Lakshan Hettiarachchi

A cloud-based messaging middleware for airline, airport, and government software systems that rely on aviation messaging for communication. This system caters to high throughput and scalability by its design of microservices and stream processing-based architecture. aeroCONNECT also communicates bidirectionally with external systems, creates and parses aviation messages (such as PNRGOV, SSM, and ASM in EDIFACT and text formats), and delivers and accepts messages from client systems with persistence and high availability.

Air Arabia currently uses this system in all of its hubs. It has provided a centralized platform for users to manage millions of messages of various specifications during the day-to-day operation of the airline. The integration time of new messages was reduced to two days as a result of this system and its architecture.

I was involved in architecture design, technology selection and training, development, testing, production stabilization, and support.

An airline seat inventory management system built for Air Arabia. It provides an interactive UI for the users to create and manage seat inventory for flights and APIs to integrate with other systems in the airline's operations. I joined this project midway through its development and went on to develop key features, such as inventory roll forward, inventory transfer, and reprotection.

A system for creating and managing airline ticket prices and surcharges. It provides a UI for users and APIs for integration with the product ecosystem. I joined the project after its production release and worked on production stabilization and feature request development to improve the client experience and add value to their operations.

An essential system used by airlines to manage, pair, and roster flight and cabin crew for their duties. It prominently solved the crew scheduling problem for Air Arabia.

I was engaged with this product for 2+ years, developing the algorithm that distributes crew to pairings and duties. I used a modified genetic algorithm to improve the quality of the output of the solution. I was also involved in understanding airline fatigue-related rule manuals; programming the rules into the system; developing a formula for fair distribution of flight hours, duty hours, and various duty types among the crew; developing reports; and assisting technical writers with product knowledge for the manuals they wrote.

A system to keep aircraft utilization high by managing airline fleets while efficiently scheduling aircraft to flights and maintenance procedures. I worked on designing and developing the aircraft rotation and routing algorithm, using the FICO Xpress optimizer, linear programming, and Java.

An application to achieve safe and efficient weight and balance of Air Arabia's fleet of A320 aircraft. The core of this system relied on linear programming and operations research and was built using Java and FICO Xpress optimizer. As an intern, I worked on the optimization algorithm for this product and documented it for future reference.