Simio LLC, specialists in risk-based planning and scheduling systems, announce the availability of the industry's first risk-filtering tool for advanced planning and scheduling (APS) systems. Aircraft manufacturers turned to Simio for an automated tool to more rapidly assess the risks in production schedules caused by variation in their operations and supply chain. The Simio team has a 35 year history of market leading innovations for variation management with simulation and scheduling applications.

"A critical problem with the traditional APS approach is that it requires all data be fully known and deterministic..." according to Dennis Pegden, Simio chairman and chief executive officer. Pegden emphasizes, "…no matter how powerful the scheduling engine, the removal of variation from the schedule will typically produce large discrepancies between predicted delivery and actual performance."

To solve this problem in complex manufacturing environments, Simio developed an automated risk-filtering tool that extends traditional advanced planning and scheduling (APS) to fully account for the variation present in nearly any production operation. This risk-based planning and scheduling approach provides the necessary information to the scheduler to allow the upfront mitigation of risk and uncertainty sooner. Risk-based planning and scheduling is a simulation-based approach that makes dual use of the underlying simulation model. The simulation model used for risk-based planning and scheduling can be built at any level of detail and can filter all of the random variation that is present in the real system that causes risk to meeting customer commitments. The result is realistic schedules that account for uncertainty, early insight into risks and potential mitigation strategies that can drive more revenue at reduced cost with exiting assets. The aircraft manufacturer now has the ability to quickly assess the quality of any schedule, along with the root cause and mitigation strategy for non value added time.