Stottler Henke Provides Aurora Scheduling System

Stottler Henke Associates of San Mateo, Calif. have created Aurora™ intelligent scheduling software system. Aurora software is the first intelligent planning and scheduling system that enables companies to easily encode and apply sophisticated decision-making rules. The Aurora scheduling system generates schedules more effectively than traditional systems by applying domain-specific knowledge and heuristics, constraints, and resource requirements. Using Aurora’s graphical user interface, scheduling experts can easily configure Aurora with this planning and scheduling knowledge, as well as visualize and modify the automatically-generated schedules. Aurora is used by major manufacturers such as The Boeing Company to manage certain aspects of the process of building the Boeing 787 Dreamliner commercial airliner. Stottler Henke also is developing for the United Space Alliance (USA) an in-flight version of Aurora for proposed use on board the United States’ Crew Exploration Vehicle for next-generation manned spaceflight. Aurora was originally developed to help NASA tackle difficult, mission-critical scheduling problems that previously required the judgment and experience of expert human schedulers. For example, Aurora is deployed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to schedule the use of floor space and other resources at the Space Station Processing Facility (SSPF), the world’s largest low-particle clean room where International Space Station components are prepared for space flight. Aurora was also used to create Aurora/AMP, a replacement for the Automated Manifest Planner developed by Stottler Henke and used by NASA since 1994. AMP generates short-term and long-term (10 year) schedules of ground-based activities that prepare space shuttles before each mission and refurbish them after each mission. For more information, visit www.stottlerhenke.com.