Ascent Technology, Inc.

Ascent Technology, Inc. is a software company based in Boston, Massachusetts. It builds resource allocation, workforce optimisation and workforce management software for labour intensive operations. Its customers include airlines, airports, casinos, defence, hospitals, hotels, resorts, retail and security organisations.

The company was founded nearly 40 years ago by members of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its website dates the founding to 1986. The company says it works closely with the MIT research community.

The SmartAirline Operations Center helps airlines forecast, plan, schedule and manage resources for flights, stations and passengers. It supports planning and real time management of gates, stands, check-in counters, baggage belts, ramp equipment and departure lounges.

The SmartAirport Operations Center does similar work for airports. It handles schedule recovery when operations do not go to plan. It can also calculate ground resource fees with a usage based billing system. The site says its AI recommends responses to situations, subject to human oversight.

The Ascent WorkZone workforce management system plans, schedules and deploys staff. It creates plans against forecast workload, assigns tasks in real time, and tracks time and attendance. Workers can use self service tools to view schedules, trade work periods and request leave.

Ascent delivers its solutions as a cloud-hosted service called From Touchdown to Takeoff. The company says it has provided hosted solutions from its managed data centre since 1998, and from AWS cloud environments since 2017. Its resource information system is called ARIS.

Services include advisory and consulting, project management, knowledge engineering, and implementation, integration and installation. Knowledge engineers gather business rules, and the company shows customers how to maintain the knowledge base without outside help.

Services

• SmartAirline Operations Center
• SmartAirport Operations Center
• Ascent WorkZone workforce management
• From Touchdown to Takeoff cloud-hosted service
• Advisory and consulting
• Project management
• Knowledge engineering
• Implementation, integration and installation
• Training
• Support