Jettainer, Cologne University conduct live test

Jettainer, the leading international service partner for outsourced ULD management, and the University of Cologne are conducting a live test on the management software that they have jointly developed. This is designed to illustrate how well the software can already support the company’s controllers by offering them assistance in making decisions as a result of its analysis of large volumes of data.



The software has undergone a huge amount of change since the start of its development in 2013 as a result of the analysis of the movement data of ULDs and feedback from the controllers. The software is now able to make suggestions for management procedures on its own. Human beings, however, always make the final decisions. They now have a system at their side, which offers live assistance in making decisions, for example, by searching for alternative routes and scheduling scenarios within a few seconds.


The live test, which has just been launched, covers several major airline customers and this will allow further valuable conclusions and improvements to the software. In future, other packages like weather data, holiday periods or even information on events will be incorporated within the system. This will then enable it to take into account any envisaged increase in the need for ULDs in conjunction with a major event. This will create further opportunities for preventing both empty flights and excess capacity. As the decisions made by the controllers are also fed into the system, the software will become more and more intelligent over time.


Six research staff at the University of Cologne and eight employees from the company are working on the research project, which is being funded by Jettainer. Once the live test has been concluded, a decision about the next steps will be made at the end of the year.