Scheduling Software for Complex Scenarios

About this technology

Overview

To resolve complex, mission-critical scheduling issues and predict possible problem areas, NASA historically relied upon expert human schedulers who used their judgment and experience to determine where things should happen, whether they will happen on time, and whether the requested resources are truly necessary. NASA selected Stottler Henke Associates, Inc., a software design firm with a long history of solving NASA's unique dilemmas, to capture and encode the knowledge embodied by these human experts. For this project, the company was contracted through a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award facilitated by Kennedy Space Center. As a result of the partnership, Stottler Henke developed Aurora, an intelligent planning and scheduling system that enables NASA to solve complex scheduling problems quickly, by encoding and applying sophisticated, domain-specific decision-making rules. The software Stottler Henke designed for NASA applies a combination of artificial intelligence techniques to produce a system capable of rapidly completing a near-optimal schedule. The company has modified the software, and released it as a commercial scheduling tool that is usable in non-NASA situations, allowing the general public to solve a plethora of complex industry scheduling problems.