[tangfj]

Does anyone know if there is a distance engine that will connect with OTM to return aeronautical miles and average flight times between two points? What have others done in the past to get flight times in OTM for air legs? Thanks in advance!

[tangfj]

On a somewhat related note, one more thing I wanted to ask is if anyone knows if it's possible to integrate air schedules into OTM via integration? I looked into a copy of an XSD that I have and found the schema for Schedule but this looks to be more for dock scheduling and not air scheduling. Anyway, any insight on this or aeronautical mileage engines would be a great help!

[SamWoodcock]

tangfj -

I am not sure about distance engines for air miles in particular. In the past I have configured Air moves using LOOKUP Rate Service. The drawback of this method is that OTM does not hold the specific date and time for flights. However, depending on your business process, this may not be a problem; are you integrating to the Air carrier directly? Is there a freight forwarder involved? What's the booking cutoff for making Air bookings?

Using Rate Service LOOKUP requires each point-point lane to be manually created and maintained in OTM (table: SERVICE_TIME). This is very heavy on the first setup but I have found the distance and times do not change that much... also as Air times are generally predictable this is quite realiable for OTM shipment planning (and you can ask for air carriers to send you real times for the shipment once the shipment moves to execution).

If you do decide to use Air Schedules, the only way to upload the schedule data is by csv. There is no standard API for this, however you could write a custom Java API to load the necessary *.ap.csv files (see DataManagement.pdf for details on this process)