DIU partnered with Amazon Web Services, C3 AI, and Google Public Sector to accelerate, optimize, and automate the U.S. Department of Defense’s flight scheduling processes.
Mountain View, CA (February 19, 2025) — The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) currently plans and schedules logistical movements across the globe manually in all domains. Factors such as vehicle capabilities, personnel, cargo priorities, maintenance, operator constraints, and weather are all considered to meet mission taskings, which complicate the flight schedule development process. Although the existing systems and processes work relatively well, commercial logistics tools are often faster, more effective, and more operationally cost-efficient.
In late 2022, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) partnered with the Air Force’s Operational Energy Office, the U.S. Navy’s Air Logistics Office (NALO), and United States Transportation Command’s (USTRANSCOM) Air Mobility Command (AMC) to prototype a commercial solution for some of the DoD’s logistical challenges. This program, titled Air Logistics Optimization (ALO), focused on optimizing the scheduling and allocation of transport flights to minimize empty legs and reduce the DoD’s fuel consumption, lower its carbon footprint, and more effectively accomplish its missions. Using DIU’s competitive Commercial Solutions Opening process, the team awarded contracts to Amazon Web Services, C3 AI, and Google Public Sector to leverage each company’s unique toolsets.
For the Air Force’s Operational Energy Office, C3 AI developed a user-friendly dashboard that fuses aircraft sensor and mission data to analyze the effectiveness of the Air Force’s operational energy initiatives using AI, which reduced the time from raw data collection to insights by 92% – from three days to approximately two hours. These insights allowed DoD leaders to establish more efficient flight protocols, resulting in a service-wide lowering of fuel consumption without compromising combat capability.
For NALO, Google Public Sector developed a new user-facing application which aggregates the regular intake of individual lift requests and yields a flight schedule backed by a sophisticated optimization engine, eliminating the toil of the existing manual processes while simultaneously optimizing for fuel savings across the Navy. Beyond streamlined scheduling, Google Public Sector’s solution enables dynamic disruption management, seamlessly accommodating real-time adjustments for unforeseen events like weather or aircraft maintenance. The total solution will reduce NALO’s scheduling process from weeks to hours, enabling them to respond to operational disruptions in real time. By providing a single pane of reference for all crews and operations centers, NALO will significantly enhance operational readiness, fuel efficiency, and situational awareness.
U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Matthew Lamb, 521st Contingency Response Squadron air transportation specialist, directs cargo loading machinery onto a Lockheed C-130 Hercules, with help from members of the 41st Airlift Wing and the 19th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron, during Exercise Bamboo Eagle 24-3 at Edwards Air Force Base, California, Aug. 9, 2024.
For USTRANSCOM and AMC, AWS produced its internal air logistics optimization engine for the DoD’s use. With their ability for on-time package delivery worldwide, Amazon’s solution can scale to support TRANSCOM in their DoD mission. Their product covers long-term route and capacity planning, optimization of annual and quarterly schedules, and the execution and management of flight plans, including disruption management and recovery. During a demonstration, Amazon developed several route options which reduced the number of needed aircraft by up to 50%, drove mission operation cost savings by 12%, and reduced pallet delivery expenses by 10%. AWS will continue to prototype with USTRANSCOM and AMC through FY25.
These ALO capabilities significantly alleviate the manual burden placed on flight scheduling analysts, while also minimizing flight time and fuel usage by providing efficient routes with no impact to the mission.
“Commercial solutions such as those offered by our ALO commercial partners help to address the volume, scale, and complexity of logistics challenges within the DoD,” shared Lt. Col. Tom Horan, AI/ML Portfolio Director. “The ability for these solutions to enable efficient, on-time delivery in both peacetime and contested operations makes optimizing air logistics a priority for the Department of Defense, given its impact on national security.”
C3 AI and Google Public Sector, received success memos for their prototypes and are in the process of, or have transitioned to production contracts which allows for follow-on production contracts from any government organization with similar problem sets. Google Public Sector will receive bridge funding through the Navy’s Energy Resilience, Efficiency, mission Assurance, energy Conservation, Training and education, energy Security (Energy-REACTS) program, and transition to a production contract where it will mature to a potential program of record (POR). AWS achieved several key milestones, including a demonstration that showcased their prototype’s proof of concept and value to TRANSCOM.