FRIARTUCK CREATES SCHEDULES IN MARS TIME FOR NASA

When NASA needed software to schedule scientists and engineers for the Mars Rover, which successfully landed on Mars on January 4, they did not turn to Microsoft or other software giants. Instead they turned to FriarTuck that specializes in complex scheduling solutions.

In Science team alone, there are about 200 scientists working on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, filling 22 different operational roles. Any one scientist is qualified to fill one to five different roles based on their expertise and experience. Creating and maintaining the staffing schedule for the mission requires that the duty planner staff the 22 roles for both rovers while adhering to rules about rest time and work weeks that are designed to minimize personnel fatigue. On top of this, the whole mission is run on Mars time. Since a Mars day is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, this means that staff show up for their shifts 40 minutes later each day. Furthermore, there are another 4 more teams in addition to the Science Team. It's an extremely challenging problem to find an optimal schedule that works within all these constraints.

“Our problem model generates over one million variables. Our investment in solver technology really paid off here. The technology generates optimized schedules quickly. For the customer, this means increased productivity, reduced fatigue, and ultimately a more cost-effective mission" – Sevugan Alagappan, Co-Founder & CEO, FriarTuck.

FriarTuck’s manpower planning software FTStaffRosterer is designed for handling the most complex scheduling requirements and preferences. Its proprietary engine uses latest research results in optimization, and is capable of generating high-quality schedules within minutes. FTStaffRosterer is not a typical standalone application, but it’s an online based. This provides increased accessibility and flexibility to end-users who now just need an Internet connection and a standard web browser to plan out their schedules either from home, office or even while on the move. In addition, any updates to the application are done centrally and are immediately visible to all users. Unlike other web based systems, FTStaffRosterer utilizes the power of the client machine to provide an intuitive, graphical and media rich environment like a standard PC application.

FriarTuck engineers have been working with NASA Ames Research Center (AMES) and the Jet Propulsion Lab over the past six months to customize and deploy its manpower planning system. This involved adapting FriarTuck's system to meet NASA's requirements. Mr Sevugan Alagappan spearheaded the deployment of the software at NASA AMES Research Center facilities located at Moffet Field, California.

"The most challenging aspect of this project was the unforgiving schedule. After learning about the requirements, we set out adapting our manpower scheduling engine to NASA's needs, and equipped it with custom-made user interfaces” - Edgar Tan, Software Development Engineer, FriarTuck.

The NASA MER FTStaffRosterer system is currently in use on the MER mission. Preferences for work shifts and scheduling requirements are entered via online-based modules. The MER FTStaffRosterer then produces a staffing schedule that meets the constraints, if possible. If any constraints are violated, it produces a report that can be used to correct the violations. With the MER FTStaffRosterer the science staffing schedule can be modified quickly and distributed to the whole team via its native interface with the NASA-developed Collaborative Information Portal (CIP), an information management tool also in use on the mission.

“FTStaffRosterer has enabled us to check existing schedules for violations and ensure that no staff member is double-booked or overworked. It has provided a means of easily managing the schedule through convenient data entry screens and options for export of the roster to Excel and CIP formats. Without FTStaffRosterer, the duty planners would have to manually integrate staffing plans from ad hoc sources such as spreadsheets -- a very labor intensive and time-consuming process. Checking for constraint violations and double-booking of personnel would be extremely difficult. With FTStaffRosterer, the integration and constraint-checking tasks are automated and efficient” – Joan D. Walton, NASA Ames Research Center.

FriarTuck—Scheduling Complex Events
FriarTuck is a software company dedicated to developing and marketing turnkey software solutions and consulting services for scheduling of complex events. The company powers its products with constraint programming technology in addition to and in combination with Operations Research and heuristic techniques. The use of these technologies allows FriarTuck to deploy robust and cost-effective solutions that add value to its clients by generating optimized event schedules.

FriarTuck focuses on optimized event scheduling in the markets of manpower rostering, tournament scheduling, and course timetabling. The company shows its commitment to its clients worldwide by providing continuous technical support and training throughout the project and software cycle. FriarTuck's Research and Development division is constantly striving to ensure that FriarTuck remains at the leading edge of event scheduling technologies.

Please refer to http://www.friartuck.net/ for more details.

NASA MER FTStaffRosterer: Optimized Staff Rostering
FTStaffRosterer transforms the complex and time-consuming tasks of staff scheduling into a synchronized and well-managed process. FTStaffRosterer allows duty planners to generate optimal staff rosters based on complex requirements quickly and easily.

Please refer to http://www.friartuck.net/customer/case-studies/mer.htm for more details.

NASA Mars Exploration Rover Mission 2003
NASA's twin robot geologists, the Mars Exploration Rovers were launched towards Mars in July 2003 in search of answers on the history of water on Mars. The Mars Exploration Rover mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the red planet. The program seeks to take advantage of each launch opportunity to go to Mars, which comes around every 26 months as the planets move around the Sun. The two rovers will be delivered in landing craft to separate sites on Mars in January 2004.

Please refer to http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html for more details.