Component Generation And Integration For The ESC Scheduler Product Line

Many Air Force systems depend on scheduling components to effectivelymanage resources for operations, maintenance, crew training, and soon. Each system tends to have unique and complex features in thetasks, resources, constraints, policies, and objectives that arise inits domain. Rather than attempt to build up a library of schedulingcode modules, we believe it will be more flexible and economical tohave a generator of scheduling components.This project will develop a synthesis system called Planware III thatgenerates high-performance adaptive scheduling software. Planware IIIwill automatically transform a high-level model of the types ofactivities and resources in a scheduling problem into fastproblem-specific code modules, and help link them into their hostsystem. Previous work (Planware II) developed offline schedulers thatweren't designed to cope with execution failures due to, say, resourcebreakdowns or unavailability of a crew member. This proposal focuseson generating schedulers that support (1) the incremental adaptationof plans during execution, (2) the incremental adaptation of thescheduler code, and (3) the computational tradeoff between schedulequality and the time spent searching for a schedule. Planware is a general purpose generator of scheduling applications fordomains involving the coordinated utilization of multiple resourcessubject to complex rules and constraints. Its competitive advantageis the ability to develop, maintain, and evolve highly customizedscheduling applications for a fraction of the cost and time requiredby similar scheduling systems that are currently availablecommercially.Our commercialization strategy will focus on two areas:(1) Air Force and other DoD systems -- We anticipate teaming on avariety of system procurements to provide high-performance schedulingcomponents covering operations, maintenance, crew training, and otherresource management areas.(2) Manufacturing and transportation companies with well establishedERP or Supply Chain Management Systems -- We plan to exploit theweaknesses in the planning and scheduling capabilities provided byapplications included as part of the suite of tools commercialized bymajor ERP vendors like SAP, Oracle, I2, Manugistics, andtransportation RF tagging vendors such as Savi Technology andMotorola. Our strategy is to generate plug-compatible components forend-users, resulting in new or greatly improved resource managementcapability.