From airlines to packaging: How Gurobi optimises workflows

With the needs of their clients continually evolving as they aim to stay competitive in challenging markets, Gurobi are constantly looking for ways to streamline and optimise business operations in a variety of different industries.

Ranging from logistics to aviation to marketing and communications, it needs to implement business strategies and utilise the latest tech, especially automation and artificial intelligence, to ensure it stays ahead of the curve.

Whether it's enhancing a client's branding and product marketing, optimising packing and shipping operations, or assisting an airline in maximising profit through efficient routing of its planes, ongoing improvement and innovation are behind every move Gurobi makes in its pursuit of continual optimisation.

"Optimisation is about two things basically: one is about automating decisions, and then also finding good or even optimal decisions," said Dr. Oliver Bastert, Chief Technology Officer at Gurobi Optimisation.

"Decisions can be anything from solving planning problems in your supply chain, could be ensuring your marketing messaging is optimally positioned, or solving a logistics or transportation challenge up to all the way to routing of aircraft, so it's a wide variety of problems you can address with optimisation."

The 2026 Gurobi Days event held in the Victorian capital last week was a big success for the company. Recent results for their clients across various industries are impressive, with significantly improved returns, with clients building upon KPIs and delivering considerable results.

Clients from various industries, including packaging and aviation, presented at the event and had plenty of great results to share.

"We're just coming off our Gurobi Days event here in Melbourne," Dr Bastert said.

"We've seen presentations from the likes of Jetstar, Omedia and others who have presented results on more efficient packaging of goods, for example, or how to plan an airline more efficiently, or placing media billboards in an optimal way.

"With usual improvements on selected KPIs, we are seeing around 10 per cent or more, even from mature businesses who had done their planning in a very considerate way and even then we're seeing significant enhancements."

Australian airline Jetstar have seen improvements in their optimisation through Gurobi, as they manage complex operational workflows such as scheduling, crew allocation and disruptions to flights.

With a large fleet to manage and many moving parts, as well as the evolving complexity of its operations, including fuel volatility, regulatory changes and supply chain constraints, Gurobi has allowed them to optimise key decision-making, leading to compounding benefits.

"The operating environment has never been more complex - fuel volatility, regulatory change, supply chain constraints, all landing at once," said a Jetstar spokesperson.

"Our response has been to invest in the capability layer underneath our decision-making. Tools that can hold the full problem and direct our most experienced people toward the questions that require human judgment.

"Gurobi has been central to that. Speed and flexibility that lets us run real scenarios, not just ratify outputs. As we scale this across more planning horizons, we expect the impact to compound.

"Jetstar operates over 100 aircraft across thousands of weekly flights.

"The decisions required to run that network - which aircraft flies which route, accounting for fuel, maintenance, crew, and resilience simultaneously - are too complex for any manual process to solve in full.

"We've been investing in mathematical optimisation capability, including Gurobi solvers, to restore that complexity. The impact has been meaningful across fuel efficiency and operational resilience. Importantly, we can now discuss deeper trade-offs and opportunities that simply weren't visible before."

Embracing the emerging tools that have emerged through recent developments in AI and automation will certainly be crucial for Gurobi going forward. While the input from technology continues to increase, Dr. Bastert insists that human decision making will have an important role to play as well, and combining the two concepts is going to be vital to ongoing improvements to successful optimisation.

The AI requires properly conceived outputs to function correctly, which means companies must first have the right people in key positions, before making the correct inputs that will ultimately provide the best outcomes for operation across the business. 

While every company will face evolving challenges and difficult market conditions, the effective utilisation of optimisation will see compounding benefits across departments as efficiencies scale and improve over time.

"I think there's enormous continued pressure on using resources more efficiently, and while the complexity of the businesses is increasing, it becomes much harder to understand how to operate efficiently and this is exactly where optimisation can help," Dr. Bastert said.

"Optimisation itself is a very well-established methodology, which probably the one thing why it's not adopted from every organisation yet is this accessibility and the need for having experts to configure the software and this is exactly what Gen.AI helps us with now, so it now becomes easy that the business themselves can formulate their requirements in natural language and then interact with our software most efficiently.

"In airlines you're doing things like your flight schedules, you're then looking at assigning aircraft to your scheduled flights, so the so-called tail assignment, or you're planning for your crew pilots, who goes on which plane, and when. 

"These are the typical challenges they're solving in aviation and we're seeing a shift towards more focusing on fuel, for example."