Aurora Scheduling System

Stottler Henke Associates, Inc.

San Mateo, CA

Aurora is a sophisticated scheduling system that combines a variety of scheduling techniques, intelligent conflict resolution, and decision support to make scheduling faster and easier.

Aurora shows the schedule in a series of graphical displays that allow the user to see the resource allocations and the temporal relationships among the elements. This display also allows the user to edit the schedule directly and easily. Aurora focuses on resource requirements and temporal scheduling in combination.

• The customized Aurora software was developed for NASA over the course of two years from August 2001 to May 2003.
• Stottler Henke worked with KSC to produce scheduling support designed specifically for the Space Station Processing Facility (SSPF) scheduling.
• SSPF scheduling features a variety of unusual features, most notably a concern about spatial relationships among various elements being scheduled. Customized support for this scheduling problem was developed in tandem with the more general Aurora scheduling system, which can easily be adapted to novel scheduling problems.

• Stottler Henke Associates, Inc. has successfully applied Aurora to several domains. The application of customized scheduling software such as Aurora reduces the reliance on domain experts, and changes the scheduling process from a painstaking exercise that takes days and weeks to one that can be accomplished in hours.
• Although any good customized scheduling system can give such support, most customized systems range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions of dollars. Aurora's general functionality in a flexible framework can be customized for far less.

• Aurora assists in preparing NASA's vehicles and payloads for launch. This is a complex process involving thousands of operations for each mission.
• Stottler Henke Associates, Inc., a company that applies artificial intelligence and other advanced software technologies to solve problems that defy solution using traditional approaches, developed and customized their scheduling software, Aurora, under NASA's SBIR program for Kennedy Space Center to address the needs of the Space Station Processing Facility (SSPF).

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Software; Information Sciences/Data Handling