Briefs

Southwest Airlines utilizes PolyAnalyst for flight safety data analysis SouthWest Airlines

Bloomington, IN - September 16, 2003. -- MEGAPUTER Intelligence Inc. announced a successful completion of the proof-of-concept project demonstrating benefits of applying the data and text mining system PolyAnalyst(tm) for airline flight safety data analysis. The project was sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration, Office of System Safety, and carried out in cooperation with the Analytical Methods and Tools Working Group of the Global Aviation Information Network (GAIN). The results of the project were reported to the international airline safety community at the Sixth GAIN World Conference in Rome, Italy.

The purpose of the project was to develop new text mining methodologies for the analysis of flight safety data. PolyAnalyst(tm) from MEGAPUTER Intelligence was used for the analysis of de-identified safety data from the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP) database of Southwest Airlines, with the ultimate goal of further enhancing long-term flight safety performance.

"PolyAnalyst enables flight safety officers to quickly perform extraction of stable patterns of terms occurring in pilot narratives and present the results in a convenient visual form," says Tim Logan, Director, Flight Operational Safety, Southwest Airlines. "The visualization capabilities of PolyAnalyst optimize the usage of flight safety officers' time and help create easy-to-understand executive reports, thus making the results of the analysis available to more decision makers in a timely manner." PolyAnalyst Drill Down Abilities

PolyAnalyst demonstrated efficient processing of large volumes of mixed structured and unstructured data, automated extraction of important patterns and clusters of terms from text, reporting of the results of the analysis as visual graphs, and intuitive drill down to original data records supporting the findings.

A detailed description of flight safety data analysis at Southwest Airlines and a discussion of the corresponding general methodology are available at the MEGAPUTER website at http://www.megaputer.com/company/cases/southwest.php3