Reservations System Simulator for Airlines

With one of the world’s largest fleets, the Chicago based airline is guided by industry standards when it comes to training its airport staff. The new employee training program is focused on helping new hires become prepared to face passengers and provide a world-class service to its customers. To deliver a rich, pragmatic educational experience, and ultimately prepare new staff as effectively as possible, the airline wanted to provide a fully functioning simulator with an experience virtually identical to that in real-world airport environment for new employees to be trained on.

Sartoris Technologies developed a complete, fully functioning replica of the airline’s passenger management platform. The training simulator infrastructure and services needed to be highly responsive and continuously available in order to ensure a quality learning experience for the new employees. Through its partnership with Sartoris, the airline was able to deliver a better educational experience and realize optimal service for its customers.

THE CHALLENGE

The airline company has a rigorous training program for its newly hired airport staff, which prepares them to provide excellent airline passenger experience at every airport the airline serves. Guided by industry standards, the training focuses on helping new airport employees become highly prepared for their everyday tasks and succeeding in providing best passenger care.

Sartoris Technologies delivered a robust training infrastructure that would offer new employees the same experience as working with the real software at the airport counter or gate. The training simulator needed to be much more than a “sandbox” with real-life scenarios. The simulator needed to have the same software application as the production version. To achieve these objectives, the training simulator had several critical requirements:

• Receptiveness – to provide a realistic simulation for the airport environment, the infrastructure needed to give new airline agents the real-time experience for checking-in passenger, making changes to existing itineraries, and initiating last minute adjustment at the gate. If performance was slow or sporadic, it would detract from the experience.
• 24/7/365 availability – the training application is being set up to accept international flight routes and passengers, which meant the system needed to be available around the clock, every day.
• Real-life scenarios – it was essential for the simulator to represent real-world passenger scenarios that airport employee would experience in its daily responsibilities. With a variety of over 290 real-life scenarios, Sartoris Technologies delivered an application that covers all aspects passengers experience at the airport daily.

While the airline was running the production passenger management solution, their IT staff members weren’t equipped to develop a simulator tool, nor familiar with the specifics of the application in use.

THE SOLUTION

The airline enlisted the Sartoris Technologies team, an established long-time partner, to develop and support the training simulator and its infrastructure. The team was uniquely equipped to provide the services, expertise and support the airline required.

The project was executed following an Agile management approach. During the development phase, the Sartoris team set up daily scrums and backlog grooming with the client and performed sprint with ongoing planning updates and already performed reviews. With frequent demos for the client, followed by multiple weekly internal and external progress updates the team was able to offer the following capabilities and services:

• Application and infrastructure expertise – deploying and supporting infrastructure components
• Service level responsiveness – developing systems that streamlined and sped remediation
• Adaptability – coordinated training scenarios for a classroom like function, rather than a purpose-built passenger data center of a production software
• Proactive administration – an ongoing effort to pre-empt and address potential issues
• User setup and architectural implementation – setting up access for new staff and constantly improving and refreshing the software infrastructure

By delivering a highly responsive solution the airline is able to constantly recreate the dynamics of a real airline agent/passenger environment, which helps the airline better fulfill its training mission of new airline agents.

SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE

Following are some of the key architectural elements that comprised the training simulator, which is built as a cross-platform application for the web (single page application) and iOS.

Frontend

• AngularJS is a JavaScript-based open-source front-end framework maintained by Google, which is popular for building single-page applications. The community support guarantees a constant development of useful modules and directives.
  • By making the entire solution consist of AngularJS components a robust structure of client-side code ensures that many features in this project will work without page reloading.
• Redux is a predictable JavaScript library with convenient storage option for the complete application located in an object tree within a single store.
  • One of the main benefits Redux has to offer is an easy, one-step update of data in multiple components at once.
• Normalizr library makes it easy to work with deeply nested JSON objects and Redux. Normalizr takes a deeply nested javascript object and flattens it out by simplifying your work with Redux Reducers. The main reason to deploy Normalizr is the synchronization with the API server. The flattened API response in Nested JSON is then pushed to a Redux Store.

Backend

• MongoDB is a NoSQL document-oriented database with fast access to stored data due to a wide range of utilizing indexes, the capability to scale horizontally through sharding, and high availability with replication feature.
• ActionHero.js is multi-transport Node.js API framework with integrated cluster capabilities and delayed tasks.
  • By using ActionHero we can create an easy-to-use toolkit for making reusable and scalable APIs.

Automated Testing

• Unit testing helps with the simplest testing of all individual components by validating that each unit of the software performs as design.
• Karma is a JavaScript command line tool that is used to spawn a web server which loads the application's source code and executes unit-tests.
• E2E (End-to-End testing) is a method of regression testing used to test the behavior of an application from start to finish and validate the software integration with external interfaces.
• Protractor is an end-to-end test framework for AngularJS applications, which runs tests
  against the application in a browser by performing real user interactions.
• Gitlab CI is a scalable test runner which can run multiple jobs in parallel on an unlimited number of separate machines

The airline is now expanding its simulator training tool to include international flights and passengers. Customer intelligence will fuel decisions on everything from routes to aircraft types to the seat selection. The ultimate goal is to give every airline team member who touches customers the information they need to serve customers better.