Merlin is a purpose built optimization algorithm designed to reduce a schedules duration and reduce the time and resources required to complete a schedule of work. Merlin is the proprietary intellectual property of Aurora and has been developed over several years by Aurora's expert team of mathematical optimization specialists and software engineers.

A schedule is a list of activities. Constraints restrict the order activities can appear within the schedule. For example, some activities must follow other activities or activities require certain finite resources. Merlin applies the available constraints to a list of activities and sequences the activities according to a selection rule chosen by the user.

Merlin is an extremely powerful planning and scheduling tool. It enables users to generate feasible schedules to test a number of constraint scenarios. Even if the user chooses to edit the optimized schedule, they know they are starting with a clean feasible schedule.

Merlin does not require complex configuration to make it run. These is no need to learn a macro-language to run the solution.

The Merlin algorithm has the following features:

Cost

• Works to minimise the resources and costs required to efficiently complete the scheduled project.

• Considers cost of undertaking an activity through the resources assigned to it by reviewing the commercial data stored in the database.

Performance

• The solution time is very fast; typically Merlin can resolve a 1000 activity schedule in less than (<) 10 seconds.

Quality

• It’s design exploits the problem structure enabling it to quickly generate feasible schedules which will always honour all constraints such as time windows, activity precedence’s and incompatibility constraints.

Activities

• Can split long activities across shift boundaries to allow day and night shift teams to work consecutively on the activity.

• Prevents the simultaneous scheduling of incompatible activities.

Resources

• Preferentially allocate work to the least or most utilized teams.

• Will retain teams in the same location or work area given Merlin’s spatial capability.

• Resource totals and individual resource type numbers can be limited to a shift or set of shifts

Temporal

• Can apply multiple disjoint time windows for each team and activity.

• It has the concept of shifts and discreet project windows allowing the user to run scenario plays like, “if I reduce the shut by one shift, how many more people do I need?”