Benefits of Aurora to Air Mobility Command’s Global Air Mobility Support System

Introduction

In the operational environment (OE), Air Mobility Command’s (AMC) Global Air Mobility Support System (GAMSS) personnel, mission planners, and aircrew need to make critical decisions on the movement of aircraft and supplies while reacting and adapting to a dynamic threat environment and the effects of aggressive adversary actions. In response, AMC is moving toward distributed operations to complicate the enemy’s ability to target Mobility Air Force (MAF) assets. This move, while critical, comes at a cost. Moreover, the scale and complexity of planning, scheduling, and task management in such environments can overwhelm human decision-making and degrade mission effectiveness.

In complex environments, personnel augmented by intelligent decision-support software can accomplish 20-50% more tasks while dynamically reacting to changes when compared to the same number of personnel without intelligence automated support and under the same time constraints. Mission-critical planning tools like Stottler Henke’s Aurora attack this challenge by augmenting the Mobility Air Force airmen and speeding time-sensitive decisions across the distributed battle space of the future.

Aurora has proved its value repeatedly while deployed into complex task environments in the real world. For example, Boeing currently leverages Aurora for the parallel widebody assembly of multiple aircraft simultaneously. This includes managing tens of thousands of tasks requiring both human and equipment resources. Many require non-ergonomic operations requiring Aurora to schedule personnel to maximize throughput while limiting exposure to musculoskeletal injuries. The tailored capability of ergonomic constraints was developed for Boeing to prevent such injuries. Aurora has been proven to deliver over 20% greater throughput utilizing the same resources than previous solutions while at the same time preventing common musculoskeletal injuries.

Solution

Aurora is a framework for managing and optimizing the utilization of resources in complex domains. Aurora has been applied to domains ranging from limited resource projects such as aircraft production and submarine production to satellite downlink scheduling for the Space Force.  Aurora is a framework because it is not possible to build one complete solution to manage the wide range of resource constrained domains. Therefore, Aurora is architected so that it is easy to modify and expand all the decision points required for resource scheduling.

Aurora was designed to be easily adapted to solving tactical scheduling problems, that is, generating exceptionally useful resource assignments and schedules very quickly.  In fact, in some domains it near-optimally schedules 30+ thousand  tasks  in less than 120 seconds. This extremely fast turnaround, in addition to saving significant expert scheduler person-hours, also improves reaction time to unforeseen events by several orders of magnitudes.  New schedules and plans that used to take days or weeks to generate can be turned around in seconds or minutes.

Technical

The goal of Aurora is to maximize the throughput of tasks given a set of resources, which can include human and equipment as well as other types of resources such as physical space, while satisfying a myriad of other constraints that define the overall problem. Therefore, Aurora provides AMC with a Performance Enhancer. Aurora will provide:

• the ability to rapidly create optimized schedules that complete cargo transport tasks as soon as possible while respecting real-world constraints
• maximize utilization of limited personnel and equipment required to complete tasks,
• perform on-demand or automatic updates during the execution of the schedule to adapt to unforeseen events, changing priorities, and emerging threats, while
• minimizing changes to the near-term schedule during execution, to provide the time required to complete the prep work needed to support transport activities.

The size and complexity of Time-Phased Force and Deployment Data (TPFDD) are especially challenging, difficulty is particularly found in routing and scheduling under complex constraints. As a resource constrained scheduler, Aurora will solve this problem by representing flight as tasks, aircraft, and airfield ground slots as resources, unloading, loading, and ground operations as dependent tasks, and inter-task relationships as constraints – all with the goal of real-time development of a schedule with a minimum overall duration.

Aurora is designed so that it can be run anywhere and at any time. That is, there are versions of Aurora that run on PC’s, versions that run in the cloud, and versions that can be run on a tablet. There is no need to have an Internet connection to run Aurora, so it can be run in austere locations. Additionally, in every deployment Aurora integrates with the client’s existing systems. This usually means that Aurora pulls data from an existing system of record, creates the schedule, and then pushes the schedule (sometimes after review) back out to the system of record.

Developing software to optimize the synergy of resources, and deploying the software on diverse client systems, is an incredibly difficult problem that Stottler Henke has been working on for many decades. During this time, we have provided solutions to many complex problems faced by industry leaders, such as General Dynamics Electric Boat, Boeing, and others, as well as many of the most complex challenges faced by NASA, the United States Air Force (USAF), and Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL).

Conclusion

As proven in many other complex challenging domains, mission-critical planning tools such as Aurora will benefit AMC’s future operations in the Indo-Pacific area of responsibility. Aurora can model the complexity of the goals, adapt to changes during execution, continually provide the optimal path forward based on the latest status including the status of the human resources and equipment, as well as any present and future performance enhancing equipment. Aurora will add efficiency and predictability to the distributed operations by best leveraging the limited equipment and resources available, allowing AMC to maintain the speed and focus required to support the warfighter!