Aurora

Business Processes/Partnerships

Problem:  The DoD's maintenance facilities face a daunting scheduling challenge, in terms of the size and complexity of the maintenance that is performed on ships, aircraft, ground equipment, etc.  This scheduling challenge is exacerbated by the uncertainties that are inherent to maintenance, that requires adaptation per unanticipated events such as faults/failures discovered upon inspection of the asset.  The problem can be summarized as how best to allocate limited resources to maximize throughput considering all real-world constraints including priorities and deadlines across the entire portfolio of projects.  

Solution Description: Stottler Henke has studied human expert schedulers making scheduling decisions in critical applications for 25+ years and has implemented these decision-making processes in the world's most intelligent scheduling software, Aurora.  Aurora has been applied to a wide variety of domains, demonstrating its generality, and Aurora has always been shown to generate more optimal schedules in every domain where a comparison has been performed.  Most of these comparisons were made by the clients themselves in order to pick the tool that performed best.  In the case of Boeing, after they performed a worldwide search for applicable scheduling tools, Aurora beat all competitors, including Boeing's own internally developed software, which had been specifically optimized for aircraft manufacturing scheduling.  The use of Aurora for scheduling has typically meant that 10% to 25%+ more tasks can be accomplished with the same resources in the same amount of time (or the same tasks accomplished in 10% to 25%+ less time) compared to other scheduling methods.  

Aurora is a complete software solution that is designed to be easily customized and integrated into new domains.  Aurora is used throughout the world to solve many of the world's most challenging project management and scheduling challenges.  For example, Aurora is used by Boeing, NASA, General Dynamics Electric Boat, Mitsubishi, Pfizer, the US Air Force, Bombardier, and many others. 

Boeing selected Aurora initially for the final assembly scheduling of the Dreamliner 787 aircraft due to its superior resource-constrained scheduling and is now used on both the commercial and defense side of their business.  Boeing was kind enough to provide a subset of real data that Stottler Henke is permitted to share.  Even though this subset is much simpler than the actual project, it still reveals the significant difference between the scheduling results.  The results of scheduling this Boeing resource-loaded file with different software are as follows:

Primavera P6 – 115 days
Aurora – 102 days