Lowering the cost of using good schedules
We are proud to announce the availability of our activity and resource scheduling engine. This is the result of many months of development and refinement. The activity and resource engine decides when activities should be performed and which resources should be used.
This is a very common problem in many industries, but despite its apparent simplicity, it is a very difficult problem to solve well. There are often multiple resources that are required for an activity, be they machinery or manpower, and there may also be a variety of choices of which resources may be used. This leads to a high degree of complexity even when the number of resources and activities are small.
Many companies are doing little to plan how activities can be carried out efficiently; with tasks being carried out by teams without consideration of efficient resource use. Many systems that are being used allow visualisation of schedules, but do not provide any optimisation of the scheduling of activities or the use of resources.
Researchers have been developing different mathematical models, algorithms and heuristics that give very good solutions to these problems in a reasonable time. We have taken some of these proven techniques and added some refinements of our own to produce a ready-made scheduling engine which is small, flexible and affordable.
Software that does provide optimised activity scheduling is usually available as a fully-fledged application, with built-in support for reporting, Gantt-charts, database interfaces, etc. We have deliberately designed and implemented our scheduling engine to be directly embeddable in other systems. Deliberately avoiding extra features that may not be required allows us to offer a simple system the will be able to work with your current systems, so that you avoid paying for them again.
Our scheduling engine has been designed and implemented from the start to do just one thing and do it right – solving the scheduling problem.
The Technical Bit
The scheduling engine is implemented in standard C++, and makes extensive use of object-oriented programming to ensure efficiency, modularity and flexibility. We provide a programming interface for specifying the problem, solving the problem and accessing the solution. It has been tested with a variety of compilers on Microsoft Windows. It also does not use any third-party commercial libraries, so we retain full control over pricing and licensing.