We must understand that the true purpose of any PBS program is to allow the company to cover the flying with the minimum number of bodies. A by-product of PBS allows pilots to better preference their desires over the old pre-built line bidding. Of course, the more senior a pilot is in their category, the better their desired result will be. The quality of the output from any system largely depends on FAR 117, contractural work rules, the staffing in the particular category, the LPA, floor, and ceiling, and how much unassigned flying the company will allow after all lines are built.
The Jeppesen PBS supporters tout that what makes this program superior is the “optimization engine.”
The detractors claim the user interface is poor (which is true) and there are not enough “buckets” in each bid group (also true), and various other things.
I suspect the number one thing most pilots would like to see with the Jeppesen program is the addition of more buckets. Going from 7 buckets to 9 or 11 buckets would be great, but I suspect there would be much pushback, because the more buckets you add, the less optimization that will occur.
Those of you who remember the AD OPT PBS program will recall we had one bid group and assigned each criteria a point value of -1000 to +1000 to communicate what we desired. But, recall that was in the manual mode. There was also an automatic weighting mode that we were advised not to use because it did not allow you to define “shades of gray.” It had a desire low, medium, high, and avoid low, medium, high, as well as a neutral. 7 buckets. Sound familiar? Except, there was no optimization. If one compares the automatic mode of AD OPT to Jeppesen, Jeppesen wins hands down, but if one compares the manual mode of AD OPT to Jeppesen, slow down. AD OPT did not require optimization because your line was optimized at the time it was built.
Each program will try to give you the highest scoring line it can. Jeppesen actually converts H++,H+, H, N, L, L-, L-- to a numerical value because it is a mathematical program. Each program builds as many lines for you as it can depending on your seniority and what trips are left, and awards you the line with the highest value. With AD OPT manual mode, more than likely there would only be one line with the highest score. With Jeppesen, depending on how detailed one bids, there may be several lines with the same highest score. That is where optimization comes in. For example, lets say one wants to fly 3 day trips Wed thru Fri. Depending on how complex your bid is and how big your category is, there might be 4-5 trips departing each Wed, and you have them all in the H++ bucket. The solver can build you several lines worth the same value, and that is what allows the solver to optimize and improve the line of a junior bidder without hurting the senior bidder. Granted, that is an over simplistic example, and I would hope most pilots don't bid that generically, but you get the idea. It is much more difficult and time consuming to communicate “shades of gray” to the Jeppesen program largely because we are limited to 7 buckets.
Increasing the number of buckets would be a step in the right direction, but remember everything has ramifications. Because rather than having one bid group, we have 20, and each bid group can only have 50 bid rows, 25 of which can be “award”, it might be difficult to fully utilize all those additional buckets. And we would lose some of this glorious “optimization” we were sold on. The only thing left would be a generic program with a poor user interface.
Bottom line, I would rather be able to communicate my “shades of gray” easily instead of having my line optimized. Time to scrap Jeppesen. There are newer and better programs out there.