A new artificial intelligence (AI) tool was developed in order to help US Air Force pilots with aircrew scheduling.

Indeed, it was reported that scheduling aircraft crews are somewhat of a time-consuming task, hence, the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics has created an AI-enabled plugin that can facilitate that operation. The AI software can then automate aircrew scheduling and optimize crew resources.

As the scheduling tasks use a lot of data and factors, making it difficult for humans to manage everything. With an AI, the system is able to solve an optimization problem by using binary decisions to decide to assign a pilot to an event. When a schedule is accepted, the algorithm is rewarded, enabling it to recognize successful patterns and improve its decisions over time.

This new tool aims to ease the workload of pilots but also to give more trust to the system. If it works well, it was reported that around 7.600 airmen should be able to use the technology by this summer.