Scheduling

• Ascent Technology, Inc.
  Application: ARIS
  Ascent's ARIS® software provides real-time decision support for gate allocation, ground resource allocation, aircraft routing, tracking, and maintenance scheduling for clients in the air transportations industry. New, leading-edge airport facilities in Europe and Asia have chosen the ARIS resource allocation system for handling check-in counters, baggage belts, and other airport resources. Delta Air Lines uses Ascent's ARIS software to plan and monitor fuel use and wear on the airplane during taxiing.

• NASA
  Application: Mars Pathfinder Mission's Planning System
  The Planner system helped Pathfinder scientists account for new data as it was transmitted from Mars by the Pathfinder spacecraft, and evolve their mission plans in real-time to optimize spacecraft operations. Not only was the system used pre-launch to plan out the activities of the spacecraft, but it was also used during mission operations, on each and every day of the Pathfinder mission. "Every day, we would plug in the activities planned for that day. Then, we would take the information we'd gathered on the previous day, input this data into the Planner, and see how the activities were affected. We'd make any necessary modifications, then spit out the new plan," Mittman explains.

• Northwest Airlines
  Application: Gate Scheduling
  Northwest Airlines uses Allegro CL for its scheduling applications, developed internally for the company's three major hub airports: Detroit, Minneapolis and Memphis. The system schedules gates for incoming and outgoing Northwest Airlines flights at these three (very busy) airports.

• SISCOG
  Application: CREWS
  SISCOG's CREWS application provides solutions to the core problem transportation companies face today - effective planning and management of the work of crew members. CREWS addresses all phases of the planning and management process - long-term planning (duty and roster planning), short-term planning (staff allocation and changes to the plan), real-time management, and controlling the work done. CREWS enables quick and efficient planning and management staff, provides fast responses to train and crew changes, minimises crew-related train disruptions, and provides evaluation of strategic options. CREWS-based solutions can be fully customised to the reality of each individual company. A presentation on SISCOG's Lisp applications was given at the ECLM'13 conference, the presentation slides are available here.

• Space Telescope Institute
  Application: Spike: Hubble Telescope Scheduling System
  Spike is an activity-oriented scheduling system developed at Space Telescope Institute for scheduling the Hubble Space Telescope. Advances in artificial intelligence research inspired the overall approach adopted in Spike. Spike also incorporates several novel features including an innovative constraint representation and reasoning mechanism, and a new type of search technique motivated by research on artificial neural networks. This new approach is intended to tackle the four notable features of spacecraft scheduling that make it a difficult problem: interacting constraints, uncertainty, optimization criteria, and search.

• Trappist-1 Exoplanets
  Application: The SIRPASS Story
  Astronomers are celebration a new discovery, a treasue trove of planets found. The big news is that around a very nearby, cold, small star, seven rocky Earth-sized planets, all of which could potentially have liquid water. Three of them orbit in the habitable zone around the star. The planetary system is called Trappist-1. JPL's David S. Mittman and STSI's Robert Hawkins have co-authored a white paper that describes the project environment in which the Spitzer Integratesd Resource Planning and Scheduling System (SIRPASS) was developed and used in operations. SIRPASS is the last known adaptation of the Plan-IT II planning and sequencing tool. In the paper, they explain that because the Plan-IT II software architecture utilizes a highly object-oriented design, the core software can be easily extended for specific scheduling problem domains. Plan-IT II is developed in Allegro CL, a dynamic object-oriented development environment for ANSI Common Lisp from Franz, Inc.