OSI wins a US DOE Grant to develop supply chain software
10 January 2012
We are excited to learn that the US Department of Energy (DOE) has endorsed our ideas in how supply chain software should be developed and deployed. This project will bring to market a manufacturing process scheduling tool built on a novel hardware architecture.
The exact topic of the project is: “Optimization-Based Production Scheduling for Complex Manufacturing Plants Delivered as a Service using High Performance Computing Architecture & Algorithms”
This is a joint effort between Optimal Solutions & The University of Wisconsin's
Chemical Engineering Department.
This project will address the problem of dimensionality in today’s optimization based approaches to scheduling jobs in manufacturing, which often results in inferior solutions that cannot be scaled to real manufacturing environments. It is expected to result in increased efficiency and global competitiveness in this sector and lead to the creation of new manufacturing jobs.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION IN LAY-PERSON'S TERMS:
Manufacturing plants spend a lot of time and energy to schedule their plant operations. They often end up doing a poor job of scheduling their plants because of the complexity involved and hence incur large production costs - in the form of higher utility, raw material, and product wastage costs. Our tool will help them arrive at optimal schedules so that they can schedule well and reduce these costs & wastage. Our tool will also be delivering the scheduling technology as a "service" which means that customers need not install this as a software but simply access the technology via the web for a 'pay-as-you-go' fee - which will help them avoid expensive IT hardware, license, & maintenance costs. This will allow a large numbers of small and medium companies to access the technology which is available to only a few large companies today.
This is in line with the consulting services OSI provides to its customers today. In our offerings today, OSI provides the above as a custom-built software. The SBIR project allows us to "productize" this idea so we can bring the idea to a larger market.