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Customer Applications

General Dynamics Electric Boat

Aurora provides electric boat with intelligent scheduling capabilites

Aurora is being leveraged by General Dynamics Electric Boat (EB) for the scheduling of various aspects of submarine construction. With this, EB is provided with intelligent scheduling capabilities not available in other project management software. The AI-based systems streamline EB’s large-scale production scheduling. Production tasks are prioritized by balancing resource capacities with manufacturing requirements and constraints. The result is a dynamic schedule that adapts to real-time production variability, as well as the injection of unexpected new work. This allows EB to execute the plan as efficiently as possible.

The submarine has long been the silent backbone of United States Naval supremacy. For more than 100 years, Electric Boat has designed and built these incredible machines. Electric Boat is the designer and prime contractor for the Virginia-class submarine program. The Virginia class is the first major warship completely designed in a virtual environment, a capability pioneered by the people of Electric Boat. Through Aurora, construction schedules are shortened and costs reduced for each these submarines.

Aurora is a configurable scheduling engine that enables organizations to plug in components that provide the domain-specific expertise needed for each unique type of scheduling task. As such, customizations have been provided to further benefit EB and to provide greater efficiency to the users of Aurora, that is, the user interface has been adapted to make the EB specific user cases even more streamlined. Aurora prioritizes tasks by balancing resource capacities with manufacturing requirements and constraints. The result is a dynamic assembly schedule that will adapt to real-time production variability and allow EB to execute the plan as efficiently as possible. A significant challenge of submarine scheduling is the scale of the problem and the tangle of inter-related constraints, which make it extremely difficult to resolve conflicts. Aurora is uniquely capable of this massive scheduling challenge. Aurora is a sophisticated scheduling system that combines a variety of scheduling techniques, intelligent conflict resolution, and decision support. The software’s scheduling decisions take into account resource requirements, a variety of constraints, and any pertinent domain knowledge. Once Aurora has created a schedule, it displays it in a series of graphical images that allow the user to see the scheduled activities, resource allocations and the temporal relationships among the activities. These displays allow the user to edit the schedule directly, intuitively, and easily. Analytical capabilities help the scheduling team understand why the software scheduled the way it did, so the team can focus on those parts of the schedule that can result in schedule cycle improvement if streamlined.

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