Air Canada Selects Persistence Software to Automate Aircraft Maintenance
Persistence Software, Inc., a leading vendor of transactional application servers, has announced that Air Canada has purchased PowerTier for EJB as a key component of an innovative system for automating aircraft maintenance.
The Air Canada Integrated Diagnostic System (IDS) will allow Line Maintenance Technicians to make accurate, time-critical decisions concerning aircraft maintenance in near-real-time, and enable the Maintenance Control Center to monitor their aircraft fleet for faults. The system is expected to lead to a decrease in costly aircraft downtime and an increase in revenue. IDS is slated for limited beta release in Q4 1999, with full deployment in 2000.
"PowerTier is enabling us to design an integrated diagnostic tool to analyze aircraft maintenance information, identify potential problems, and advise on a consistent and expedient course of action," said Dave Clarke, Decision Support Specialist, Air Canada. "We expect IDS to reduce the amount of time that aircraft are grounded, enabling us to significantly decrease our costs and improve passenger satisfaction."
PowerTier will be used to develop a server application that integrates near-real-time mainframe operational data, an operational data store, thin Java client applications, and artificial intelligence decision support components. The IDS software, which incorporates artificial intelligence technologies, was developed by the National Research Council of Canada in close cooperation with the airline.
"It is absolutely essential for a system like IDS to have a scalable, reliable application server," said Mark Douglas, CTO of Persistence Software. "PowerTier is the ideal solution for a system that requires high-performance and high-availability for the management and delivery of time-sensitive data."
About Air Canada
Air Canada offers travelers more than 1,350 flights per week on 75 routes to 44 destinations -- representing more daily non-stop service between Canada and the U.S. than any other carrier or alliance of carriers. Air Canada also offers the most daily non-stop flights from eastern Canada to California. The airline's service has recently garnered a number of awards including 'Best Airline for Travel to Canada' voted by readers of Business Traveler International magazine. In addition, Air Canada was voted best Passenger Service Airline in the world by Air Transport World Magazine and was also honored with four distinctions at the 1999 OAG Airline of the Year Awards including Best North American Domestic Airline.
About Persistence Software
Persistence Software designs and develops transactional application servers, providing the foundation for distributed business processing. The Persistence PowerTier family includes PowerTier for Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and PowerTier for C++. PowerTier reduces development time with container-managed persistent objects and optimizes performance with shared transactional caching. Persistence couples standards-based products with technology transition services to assist customers in building data-intensive, distributed applications. Persistence products are in use in over 30 of the Fortune 100 and at more than 200 Global 1000 companies. Persistence was founded in 1991 in San Mateo, California and has its European headquarters in London. The company is privately held. For more information see http://www.persistence.com.