Quick pbs question
 

If someone lives locally and doesn't mind coming to work 5-6 times/month. Which SET command works best to avoid back to back trips...

SET MIN BASE REST TIME?

Thanks in advance!

SET min days between work blocks.

With min base rest time, pbs may come up with some creative solutions that may have you going to work at strange times.

That can give you back to back trips as one work block if you don't restrict the length of work blocks with an "avoid" length of trips to the appropriate length.

Change length of work blocks. Can go as high as 19 days AND waive the FAR rest in base requirement. This once gave me 8 days straight block on the 737, with the required 30 hour break in 168 at a layover. Ugly, but as a last ditch BG to get Thanksgiving off...

Did you get to eat turkey at home ?

Yes, and called in sick for one of the back to back four days, but wasn't next to a vacation or a designated holiday.

Like was said,
Set min days between work blocks (x)
Award work L--

See what comes out.

Unfortunately MIN DAYS BETWEEN WORK BLOCKS doesn't work. Two back to back 3 days is considered 1 work block. Trying to avoid that...

Got a hold of the PBS guys, got it worked out. Thanks for jumping in on this thread fellas.

I think L++ might work better. I'm pretty sure PBS reads L++ as I want lots of trips, and L-- that I want fewer.

I'm gonna have to look for this L++ command. Pretty sure I can make PBS implode with it, like dividing by zero.

I thought "Award work L--" meant I get paid to not have to come to work. No wonder i keep getting "completion mode".

While the "+"s and "-"s are most often used to prioritize trips into (up to) 7 different pool priorities, they also perform this function. It can get complicated. From the PBS Guide,

"When you put trips into any of the three High pools, you are instructing PBS to use as many of those trips as possible to build your line. Conversely, when you put trips into any of the three Low pools, you are instructing PBS to use as few of those trips as is necessary to build your line."

What APC said

Let's say you want MCO and ATL layovers.

MCO H++
ATL H+

Tells PBS give me as many of these as you can, but prioritize MCO over ATL.

The inverse is also true. L-- vs L- tells PBS give me as few as possible, but if you have to give me the L- over the L--.

Set max length work block 4
Set min days off between work blocks to 1.
Award work H (if you want day trips)
Award work L (if you want long trips)

Let's say some knucklehead was tweaking all his bids...and forgot to submit anything because he believed it was the 11th...and he even had all his standing bids open. what happens? above the g line.

You'll get Thanksgiving Day and weekend off, all other weekends off, 18 days off, no international trips, no early shows, no redeyes, and great long layovers with wild and crazy fun crews.

OR, go to CCS, Bidding, PBS, MyReports, and look at the first PDF under Oct 16_Uxxxxxx Bid Award Report.

That's the last thing submitted and should be what PBS sees when it runs your solution. If that file is from last month then it may just run a Completion Mode.

You'll get a constant reminder to get your bids in early next month.
:)

We will need to know if you are you a Capt or FO?
Not that the answer will be any different.. you just may have to wait a lot longer for one of us to give it to you ;)

AWARD Work (30 Oct-29 Nov)

Guaranteed to get a line though

Why do pilots come to these boards to ask PBS questions during the bidding window and wait/hope for a timely answer?

There is a resource run by the union and staffed by PBS trainers/volunteers to assist with bidding questions during the bidding window:

Untitled Document

This site is posted each and every month in the PBS Committee newsletter blastmailed to all pilots around the time bidding opens. They have a live chat window to have a conversation with an expert to help you figure out a bid strategy.

Not trying to be a **** at all. Just saying there is a better (official) option than the pilot forums to get the most accurate answer.

So it will automatically create an award work bid for people above the g line?

Webecheck was asking the question after bidding had closed because he didn't get his bid in on time. The good experts at prefbid aren't there all the time. After the bid closes this is what you see, although "click to leave a message" may get an answer.

No, but assuming you haven't submitted a reserve bid group anywhere in your month's line up, it will go into lineholder completion mode and build you a legal line. Its last ditch effort (completion mode 4) inserts AWARD Work (L--) as your first line, thus guaranteeing you a line full of out-base redeyes and non-commutable trips. But a line nonetheless.

Nobody is on station there once the window closes and the gonculator starts processing. I tried, of course.

Ok, thanks. I was on reserve at IAH last month, but had deleted all my reserve bids and was reworking my line bids for LAX next month. So, not a single bid, regular or standing, got submitted. PDF from last day of the window showed all bids were in fact left open.

Well, if nothing else, I'm pretty confident you'll never do that again.

True statement....

got in late from a Panama overnight, surely there is some sort of allowance for that. 😄

The obvious answer is to let FOs have 2 extra days to bid since they don't even process our bids until after the Captains have been completed. We are just locked out and nothing is happening with them. There is no reason today with the current level of computing power that this thing can't just publish lines in a couple hours and not days. My guess is that the back end looks alot like the front end (or whatever you computer guys call it) and the solver is just another thrown together POS.

You need a quantum computer processor to do it in hours, those currently only exist in laboratories.

Excellent idea. The earliest the captain bids have ever come out is the 15th. FO bidding could easily stay open through the 14th with no impact on that run.

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.