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Smarter High Performance Scheduling
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| What Aurora Is | |
The Aurora™ intelligent planning and scheduling system
combines a variety of scheduling techniques, intelligent conflict resolution,
and automated decision support to generate schedules for complex problems
more effectively than traditional scheduling systems,
quickly and easily.
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| How Aurora Works | |
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 judgement, 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. A graphical user interface enables Aurora users to enter domain-specific knowledge and specify their scheduling requirements quickly and easily. Aurora’s interactive graphical 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.
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| Customers and Applications |
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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.
The Boeing Company uses Aurora to prioritize factory production of its new flagship Boeing 787 Dreamliner™ commercial airliner by balancing resource capacities with manufacturing requirements and constraints. 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 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 is also used by companies to plan complex, large-scale manufacturing operations. Aurora has been designated by NASA as an SBIR Success Story.
Individual Aurora Success Stories(Click on the images to read more)
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| Additional Information | |
Please contact us if you would like additional information. |
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Copyright © 2006 Stottler Henke, Inc. All rights reserved. | |