Planning and Scheduling in Complex Environments

In many complex environments, personnel augmented by intelligent decision-support software can accomplish 20-50% more tasks while also being able to dynamically react to changes when compared to the same number of personnel without intelligent automated support and under the same time constraints. Stottler Henke’s Aurora attacks this challenge as a complex project scheduling problem, requiring an intelligent planning and scheduling solution to augment or fully automate human decision-making, speeding up time-sensitive decisions. Aurora has proven its value repeatedly while deployed within complex task environments in the real world.

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 injuries. Aurora has been proven to deliver over 20% greater throughput utilizing the same resources than previous solutions while simultaneously preventing common ergonomic-related injuries.

The Flexibility of the Aurora Architecture

Aurora is a framework for managing and optimizing the utilization of resources in complex domains. It supports complex project modeling, enabling the representation of detailed task dependencies, resource constraints, and real-world operational factors. Aurora has been applied to domains ranging from limited resource projects such as aircraft production and submarine production to satellite downlink scheduling for the United States Air Force (USAF). Aurora is a framework because it is not possible to build one complete solution to manage the wide range of resource constrained domains that exist today. Therefore, the Aurora architecture is constructed in such a way so that it is easy to modify and expand all the decision points required for complex project scheduling as well as 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 30,000+ 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

Aurora’s design includes the separation of the user interface from the back-end scheduling and analytics engine. In addition, the software is designed so that it can be run anywhere and at any time. That is, there are versions of Aurora that run on PCs, versions that run in the cloud, and versions that can be run on a tablet. Moreover, there is no necessity to have an Internet connection to run Aurora, enabling it to be run in austere locations.

The goal of Aurora is to maximize the throughput of 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:

• the ability to do more with less,
• maximize both the long-term and short-term throughput of limited personnel and equipment,
• extend individual capabilities over long shifts/longer careers, leveraging Aurora’s already existing ergonomic-constraint capability which considers human capabilities and endurance when assigning humans to tasks, and thus
• provides a reduction in common ergonomic injuries, since humans will only be assigned to tasks for durations that prevent injuries.

The ergonomic constraint capability of Aurora can consider performance enhancing equipment that may be available. For example, a job may be able to be worked by a human for one hour without enhancing equipment but can be worked for 1.5 hours if the person has the performance enhancing equipment available to them. So, Aurora will not only consider these factors but will also optimize the assignment of this performing enhancing equipment to different personnel for different tasking based on what maximizes the throughput of the entire endeavor.

This ability to consider the interaction and effects of assigning different resources and different situations is extended to all resources available. So, Aurora takes into consideration all the skills available for each person, the different ways that equipment can be utilized and can take into consideration requirements for certain physical space or restrictions on what type of work can be done at certain locations. Complex project modeling is central to this process, as it allows Aurora to build a comprehensive view of the project landscape, making it easier to make intelligent decisions. Optimizing the synergy of resources is an incredibly difficult problem that Stottler Henke has been working on for many decades and has provided the most optimal solutions to many complex problems faced by industry, such as General Dynamics Electric Boat, Boeing, and others, as well as many of the most complex project scheduling challenges faced by NASA, the USAF, and Los Alamos National Laboratories.

Conclusion

As proven in many complex challenging domains, Aurora’s benefits are significant. 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. Aurora adds efficiency and predictability to complex operations by best leveraging the limited equipment and resources available. Through its advanced capabilities in complex project modeling and complex project scheduling, Aurora delivers a decisive advantage in fast-paced, resource-constrained environments.