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Why Develop
Aurora-CCPM
Aurora
Critical Chain
Project
Management
Aurora-CCPM
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Overview
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Aurora-CCPM is a
combination of Aurora™, Stottler
Henke’s intelligent planning and scheduling system, with the added power
and flexibility of Multi-project Critical Chain Project Management.
The Aurora™ intelligent planning and scheduling system uses a
variety of scheduling techniques, intelligent conflict resolution, and
automated decision support to quickly and easily generate efficient
schedules for complex problems more effectively than traditional scheduling
systems.
By adding Critical Chain Project Management to an already
powerful and sophisticated scheduling software, Aurora-CCPM provides two
important additional benefits:
- Better Critical Chain (one that can potentially be
worked in less time)
- More flexibility and an improved ability to
accommodate change
By using sophisticated scheduling software as the
underpinnings for Critical Chain reasoning, Aurora-CCPM can be applied to
projects encompassing thousands of heavily constrained tasks and requiring
hundreds of different kinds of resources. Giving the Critical Chain method
such a solid scheduling basis also allows it to more easily handle complex
situations such as new tasks being inserted during the actual plan
execution, as well as other radical changes to the situation.
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Why Develop
Aurora-CCPM?
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Aurora-CCPM was
developed because the needs of companies involved in the planning and
implementation of complex, large-scale manufacturing, turnaround,
maintenance, and other operations were not being met by current CCPM
solutions. Aurora-CCPM has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in
CCPM by expanding the theory to better handle large (multi-thousand) task
projects, in addition to other general capabilities. For example, the
initial theory of Critical Chain promoted late as possible (backward
scheduling) for all applications; this is not always practical or desired.
Aurora-CCPM allows for backward scheduling, forward scheduling, or both
(mixed-mode) on a task by task basis.
The underlying Aurora scheduling engine has allowed for up to
50% project duration reduction versus other CCPM products. CCPM has the
potential to greatly enhance project efficiency, but much of this potential
benefit is lost if the project is not being scheduled well. By combining
Aurora with CCPM, schedules can be handled in the most efficient manner
possible.
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Aurora
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Traditional
scheduling systems use simple algorithms and criteria when selecting the
next activity to schedule and when assigning resources and times to each
activity. However, schedules generated by these simple and generic decision
rules are often far from optimal. To solve complex, mission-critical
scheduling problems and predict possible problem areas, organizations often
rely on expert human schedulers who use their judgment, experience, and rules
of thumb to determine where things should happen, whether they will happen
on time, and whether the requested resources are actually necessary.
Aurora solves difficult scheduling problems more effectively
than traditional systems by encoding and applying sophisticated,
domain-specific decision-making knowledge and heuristics used by human
experts, along with complex constraints and resource requirements.
Scheduling experts can use Aurora to define attributes for individual
tasks, groups of tasks, resources, resource sets, and constraints. These
attribute values can be considered by user-supplied or built-in scheduling
decision rules that are invoked within single or multi-pass algorithms at
key scheduling decision points such as determining which task to schedule
next, selecting the overall best time window and resources, or handling the
situation where not all of the required resources are available at the
required time. Additional attributes of each resource can be considered
when making intelligent resource selection decisions in order to generate
schedules that are closer to being optimal.
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Critical Chain
Project Management
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Critical Chain
Project Management (CCPM) is more powerful and resource-driven than
Critical Path Project Management. CCPM is based on methods and algorithms derived
from the Theory of Constraints. The Critical Chain is the sequence of both
precedence- and resource-dependent tasks that prevents a project from being
completed in a shorter time, given finite resources. If (non-human)
resources are always available in unlimited quantities, then a project's
Critical Chain is identical to its Critical Path.
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Aurora-CCPM
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By leveraging
Aurora's sophisticated scheduling system with CCPM theory, a much more
robust solution has been developed: Aurora-CCPM. Resource constraints
(e.g., available equipment, space, and human resources) are very important
to the implementation of the Critical Chain method because it more heavily
considers them when compared to Critical Path. Fortunately, Aurora-CCPM
takes into account resource requirements, a variety of constraints, and can
be adapted to pertinent domain knowledge. This is especially critical
during the execution phase of a CCPM plan as real-time updates arrive
regarding the status of the hundreds or thousands of tasks that make up the
plan.
Aurora-CCPM greatly enhances the practicality and power of the
Critical Chain method:
- Critical Chain can now be applied to projects
encompassing thousands of tasks
- It can also be used to handle complex emergency-type
situations, where new tasks are inserted during the actual execution
of the plan
Aurora-CCPM is simply the most powerful CCPM software
available.
Because resources are so important to Critical Chain,
Aurora-CCPM includes powerful graphical tools to help manage resources and
resource sets.
Flexible dynamic histograms of resource usage are available.
Aurora-CCPM provides an interactive graphical user interface
to enter scheduling requirements and domain-specific knowledge quickly and
easily. These interactive displays enable the user to visualize and edit
the schedule’s resource
allocations and the "temporal
relationships among activities. Scheduling problems, such as unresolved
conflicts, are highlighted to attract the user’s attention.
All the capabilities expected in modern project software are
included, for example, Gantt charts with progress bars.
Aurora-CCPM includes a flexible Fever Chart allowing
customization as shown in the following two figures.
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Customers and
Applications
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Aurora-CCPM is being
utilized
by Boeing in the Final Assembly of the B787 Dreamliner. Aurora-CCPM
provides Boeing with Critical Chain capabilities not available in other
Critical Chain software. Aurora-CCPM prioritizes factory production tasks
by balancing resource capacities with manufacturing requirements and
constraints via the Critical Chain method of buffer management. The result
is a dynamic assembly schedule that adapts to real-time production variability
and allows Boeing to execute the plan as efficiently as possible.
Aurora was originally developed to help NASA tackle difficult,
mission-critical scheduling problems that previously required the judgment
and experience of expert human schedulers. For example, Aurora was deployed
at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to schedule
the use of floor space and other resources at the Space Station
Processing Facility (SSPF), the world’s largest low-particle clean room
where International Space Station components are prepared for space flight.
Because SSPF processing and launch costs are very expensive, it is
necessary to meet launch dates and utilize SSPF resources efficiently.
However, this is difficult because there are many types of resources,
tasks, and constraints; the floor space and resources are overcommitted;
and the constraints are unusual.
Aurora was also used to create Aurora/AMP, a replacement for
the Automated
Manifest Planner developed by Stottler Henke and used by NASA since 1994.
AMP generates short-term and long-term (10 year) schedules of ground-based
activities that prepare space shuttles before each mission and refurbish
them after each mission. Because the shuttle spacecraft and ground-based
facilities are so expensive, increasing the number of shuttle launches by
just one is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, so finding near-optimal
schedules is critical. Rapid generation of near-optimal schedules enables
NASA to perform what-if studies efficiently that analyze numerous alternate
scenarios.
“The precursor version of Aurora is used daily to support
major processing and space shuttle launch decisions; to coordinate our
launches with those of Russia, Japan, and the European Space Agency; and to
determine NASA's launch requirements and flight rates," says NASA
Shuttle Processing Manager Tom Overton. "It enables us to generate
complex schedules in a few hours, compared to days or weeks required by our
previous scheduling systems."
Aurora will be included in Temporis, an on-board scheduling
system to be used by NASA crew members aboard the next generation Crew
Exploration Vehicle.
Aurora has been designated by NASA as an SBIR
Success Story.
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Video History of Aurora at NASA
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