Aurora is the most advanced Intelligent Planning and Scheduling Solution available on the market today.
Aurora™ is the world’s leading intelligent planning and scheduling software solution that utilizes advanced artificial intelligence. It was originally developed to help NASA tackle difficult, mission-critical scheduling problems with complex constraints by incorporating the judgment and experience of expert human schedulers. Aurora is particularly effective when applied to large projects with complex constraints and resource requirements. Over the last 25 years, an increasing number of organizations have chosen Aurora to manage operations more efficiently than any other system it has ever been compared to, and for Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Aurora has proven vastly more powerful than any other solution including Microsoft Project and Primavera P6.
Customer Success Stories
The Boeing Company
The Boeing Company uses Aurora to prioritize production of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner™. Aurora’s dynamic assembly schedule adapts to real-time production variations, so Boeing can produce aircraft as efficiently as possible.
Mass General Hospital
Aurora is used by the Massachusetts General Hospital to schedule its medical residency program. Aurora reduces the time and effort needed to generate schedules, and provides better support for the hospital’s complex staffing needs
United Space Alliance
United Space Alliance included Aurora in the design of Temporis, a scheduling system targeted for use by NASA crew members on board next generation spacecraft during deep space missions.
Aurora-ProPlan
Aurora-ProPlan is a component of the Intelligent based Manufacturing (IbM) initiative at Pfizer. It adds capabilities necessary to perform pharmaceutical production optimally.
NASA: Space Shuttle
Aurora/AMP, in service for 18 years at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, generated short- and long-term (10 year) schedules of ground-based activities that prepared and refurbished Space Shuttles before and after each flight. Rapid scheduling enabled NASA to analyze numerous what-if scenarios efficiently. Aurora/AMP was used until the final space shuttle program concluded.
Dental Student Scheduling
New York University (NYU) College of Dentistry uses Aurora to create dental student schedules, including scheduling student courses while accounting for clinical rotations. Aurora schedules ensure that all students have all the necessary experiences, while appropriately staffing all clinics. Furthermore, Aurora determines how to appropriately allocate all rooms, taking other programs and special events into account.
Audit Scheduling
TenA Company, founded in 1982, is the premier mortgage quality control service in the United States, assisting thousands of mortgage lenders each year. Among their carefully vetted personnel are counted Legal & Compliance experts and a QC Solutions team.
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), selected Aurora for its unique capabilities including intelligent resource scheduling to improve their project management, including increased throughput and greater project transparency.
Pilot Training
The US Navy has selected Aurora-CCPM™ software to schedule submarine maintenance operations at the Naval Submarine Support Facility (NSSF).
Navy: Submarine Support
The US Navy has selected Aurora-CCPM™ software to schedule submarine maintenance operations at the Naval Submarine Support Facility (NSSF).
Korea Aerospace Inudstries Ltd. (KAI)
Aurora helps Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) to schedule production of composite parts for Boeing’s Dreamliner.
General Dynamics Electric Boat
Aurora is being leveraged by General Dynamics Electric Boat (EB) for the scheduling of various aspects of submarine construction.
Air Force Satellite Scheduling
The Aurora intelligent scheduling framework has been applied to Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) scheduling to create an automatic scheduling and deconfliction capability called MIDAS. Read the MIDAS Story
Bombardier Learjet
Aurora helps Bombardier Learjet schedule their airplane assembly operations more quickly, so they can handle production rate changes and component delivery delays more effectively.
Automobile Industry
A major automobile manufacturer selected Aurora to optimize its vehicles for destructive and non-destructive crash testing.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) is using Aurora to accelerate its production of Boeing 787 Composite Wing Boxes.
Aurora outperforms conventional software solutions
Aurora outperforms conventional software because it uses artificial intelligence technologies to encode and apply extensive scheduling knowledge and rules to perform automatic resource scheduling. In a study conducted by the Boeing company, Aurora managed resources more efficiently than software developed and updated by Boeing for almost two decades, that was specifically designed for their application. When compared to Primavera, Aurora reduced turnaround time by more than 15%. Compared to Microsoft Project, Aurora’s schedules were 30% shorter. Aurora is not only more efficient but also provides many capabilities not available in other project management software such as Microsoft Project and Primavera P3 / P6 (see unique capabilities below).
Aurora Takes A Different Approach
Most systems use simple rules to select and schedule activities and assign resources to carry them out. Often, these schedules are far from optimal. Aurora solves complex problems more effectively by encoding and applying sophisticated scheduling knowledge and decision-making rules, along with complex constraints and resource requirements. Aurora encodes attributes of individual tasks, groups of tasks, resources, resource sets, and constraints. Aurora’s built-in and user-supplied decision rules produce better schedules by considering these attributes at key scheduling decision points such as determining which task to schedule next, assigning the best time and resources to each task to optimize the overall schedule, and handling situations in which some resources are not available when the task is scheduled.
In addition to allowing rapid, easy schedule development Aurora addresses issues overlooked by many scheduling systems. By focusing on resource requirements and temporal scheduling in combination Aurora considers these different scheduling aspects in combination. This is especially important in domains where there are a range of resource requirements. Aurora provides many capabilities not available in other Project Management software such as Microsoft Project and Primavera P3 / P6; or other finite capacity scheduling software.
Aurora Is User-Friendly
Aurora’s graphical user interface enables users to enter domain-specific scheduling knowledge and requirements quickly and easily. Interactive graphical displays enable users to visualize and edit the schedule’s resource allocations and temporal relationships among activities. Aurora automatically detects and highlights scheduling problems such as unresolved conflicts. For further details view this presentation on Intelligent Scheduling. If you’d like to know what our clients are saying about Aurora you can view our customer testimonials. If you still don’t believe we can help reduce your project turnaround times then contact us to take the free Aurora Challenge!
So Many Benefits, But Paradigm Shift Slows Adoption: A Lesson To Learn From GM, NUMMI & Toyota
GM provides a prescient lesson to slow adopters of intelligent scheduling or critical chain. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: How it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Although all was made available to GM, GM did not change and paid the price. Listen to the details here.
Recognition
-NASA designated Aurora a Small Business Innovation Research Success Story.
-NASA showcased Aurora’s innovative technology in a Hallmarks of Success video.
-Aurora has been featured in MDA Tech Update, Defense Tech Briefs, NASA Tech Briefs, and Spinoff (NASA’s premier publication featuring successful spinoff technologies).
Strategic Benefits
- Project Portfolio Management (PPM) / Enterprise Resource Planning Optimization (ERPO): Aurora optimizes the resource planning of all of an enterprise’s resources across all projects.
- Shortens projects by allocating resources more efficiently.
- Saves the labor of human schedulers by automating what they do.
- Enables more robust modeling of scheduling problems, so it can schedule projects automatically that other tools cannot even model.
- Provides intelligent conflict resolution.
- Provides explanations on why each activity/task was scheduled where it was, adding transparency.
- Disruptions to the original plan including interjections of new tasks during execution are handled optimally.
- Interfaces with Primavera P6, Microsoft Project, Siemens TeamCenter, Artemis, PSS, Open Plan, PS8, Oracle and other enterprise applications; to import, analyze, and export schedules.
- Multi-product multistage batch plant scheduling
- Parallel machine scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times
- Campaign and lot size scheduling problem
- Production scheduling
- Economic lot scheduling problem (ELSP)
- Scheduling problems with setup times and/or costs
- Production planning of batch plants
- Multi-stage multi-product batch scheduling
- Sequence-dependent job scheduling
- Job scheduling using parallel non-identical machines with sequence dependent clearance times
- Parallel machine scheduling problem with setups, release and due dates and additional constraints related to the scarce availability of tools and human operators
When compared to Primavera, Aurora reduced turnaround time by 20%. Compared to Microsoft Project, Aurora reduced turnaround time by 30%! Find out how much time you could save by taking the ‘Aurora Challenge‘ – a free study that will enable you to benchmark Aurora against your current schedules.
Approaches used by others, that Aurora outperforms, includes the following:
- Discrete event simulation
- Genetic algorithms
- Multi-grid continuous-time formulations
- Tabu search algorithm
- Iterative two-stage decomposition solution strategy
- Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) scheduling / Mixed integer mathematical model
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