Case Study: Northwest Airlines achieves real-time, resilient gate scheduling with Franz Inc.'s Allegro CL

Northwest Airlines - Customer Case Study

Northwest Airlines needed to manage gate assignments at three major hub airports (Detroit, Minneapolis and Memphis) where high traffic and limited gate capacity—Detroit handles about 360 departures a day with only 60 gates—combine with unpredictable weather, late flights, personnel/resource changes and aircraft‑gate compatibility issues to create frequent last‑minute scheduling challenges and complex passenger/baggage connection coordination.

Franz Inc.'s Allegro CL was used to build an expert gate‑scheduling system that recommends optimal gates, displays graphical schedule changes, transmits assignments to other systems (so the correct gate prints on boarding passes) and tracks passenger and baggage connections. Allegro CL’s dynamic object‑oriented features allowed live updates without taking the system offline and supported rapid, user‑driven development, enabling Northwest Airlines to handle hundreds of daily departures more reliably and to add new capabilities (such as a de‑icing management module).

Northwest Airlines

Jean Prevost

Project Manager