Aurora Intelligent Scheduling for Increased Maintenance Throughput

Business IT and Analytics

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

Results with similar improvements have been realized in many different domains. NASA currently utilizes Aurora for some of its most complex scheduling challenges, and Aurora scheduled the maintenance, repair & overhaul (MRO) of the Space Shuttle during its tenure.

Aurora is best leveraged when integrated with other enterprise applications. So, the next step is to integrate Aurora with other DoD data sources for seamless data flow, so that the DoD can receive all the benefits of Aurora, including but not limited to the following: 1) Multiple-pass intelligent resource-constrained scheduling; 2) Large multi-project support; support for 100,000+ tasks per project; 3) Mixed-mode scheduling — providing both ASAP and ALAP scheduling; 4) Schedule rationale — Aurora provides an explanation for each task on why it was scheduled where it was scheduled; 5) Support for more types of constraints than other software.