I guess all those other PBS solvers somehow have access to those special computers then.

PBS created an award work bid for me. 70 hrs credit and 19 days off. 2 x 4 days and 2 x 2 days. No cross town trips and no redeyes. Not exactly sure how this happened, but wow did I ever dodge a bullet!

This sounds better than the line I got sweating over my bids for hours. :D

Are you above the g-line? If you're above the g-line then you're guaranteed a line, even if you don't bid. At least that's how I understand it. So "award work" must be the default bid when someone above the g-line doesn't submit any bids.

And I might've accidentally tried to add you to my contacts when I was writing that post. Not sure what that means, but please ignore!

Too late brah, we're now friends. Most senior buys the first round. Cheers!

Deal! Probably you, since I only recently ditched my half-wing! :D

They don't solve to >95%. You do understand exactly how it works, and how algorithms work, right? I'm assuming you don't otherwise you would know exactly what it is you're proposing be done in a matter of hours.

Don't worry, when quantum processors get out of the lab and on the market you'll be able to get a PBS line optimized to around 99.9% in a few seconds.

No. The "solving to >95%" that you speak about is a result of only having 7 discrete bid groups. The solver assumes that all trips in the same weighting are equally desirable by you. So it goes up and down and does something called "brute force" crunching to "optimize" the lines. The problem is that if you had 100 weighting (i.e. 1-100) the solver wouldn't do this. It would optimize your line, and move on.

Most of what the solver is doing is wasting time while it moves trips in and out of your schedule that to the solver you are equally indifferent about. That is not true. If you were asked about those 5 trips all in the N bracket and asked to rank them from 1-5 you'd do it in a heartbeat. But you can't, because you only get 7 weightings. So if there are 35 trips you desire you have to bunch them in groups of 5. This means the solver can potentially "brute force" build you hundreds of combinations of lines. Doing this with over 10,000 pilots is why the solver does it.

So what we need is to let the PILOTS be the solver and give us 100 weighting (1-100) and then just give us the trips in that order. If we want to put all our trips at 50 weighting the solver can flip those in and out.

But the solver is doing busy work and not really accomplishing anything.

All the while we are told to just be a good little lamb and not question the system that's obviously flawed.

Garbage in, garbage out. You get sorta how it works (or you can copy paste) so if you're not being exact and telling PBS precisely what you want... Whose fault is that? You're proposing going from seven weighting pools to 100 to speed it up too??? So 12000 pilots go from seven weighting pools to 100, you're probably talking trillions of possible solutions.

I've gotten my #1 or 2 bid group every month, month after month because I bid what I know my seniority can hold. If you're at 80% and trying to pick trips, or at 10% and not giving appropriate avoid/award commands, thats not a failure of PBS. Could it be easier? Sure, and Boeing could build a better airplane than the 737, but it's what we have. My bidding QOL is up to me to understand how it works, sink or swim.

As far as the speed, if you want lesser optimization levels we can get it sooner.