Tucked away in a bustling college town 3,000 miles from Silicon Valley is a technology start-up that boasts a considerable brain trust and equally impressive plans.
Dynadec Corp.’s outside-the-mainstream location — the company is housed near Brown University in Providence, RI — belies its mission to make optimization technology more mainstream. Founder, Chief Technology Officer, and Brown computer science professor Pascal Van Hentenryck says Dynadec’s optimization software differs from other offerings in a number of ways, but most importantly in the speed with which it parses complicated data sets to deliver decision support.
At the core of Dynadec’s solutions for vehicle routing, workforce optimization, and resource scheduling is the Comet engine. Born of Van Hentenryck’s decades of research in modeling and optimization techniques, the Comet platform uses a specialized blend of mathematical programming, constraint programming, and local search functionality to bring on-time decision support to manufacturers and others.
To produce the perfect solution to a complex problem, a traditional optimization engine might agonize over gigabytes of data for eight hours, Van Hentenryck explains. Comet’s local search capabilities instead narrow the problem set and might spit out a good enough solution in three minutes, he says.
“People are often willing to make those trade-offs in a real-time environment. And that’s really what Dynadec’s all about, and that’s what Comet’s all about,” he says.
Comet’s applications in manufacturing are varied. Van Hentenryck points to a production environment in which machines break down over time. Comet can build a model “describing when they can break, when the quality deteriorates, how the processing time of some of the jobs on the machine [is] deteriorating with time. And then you can actually schedule using that information.”
With an enviable pedigree — Van Hentenryck’s doctoral treatise in the 1970s served as a foundation of constraint-based programming — the start-up hopes to make headway in a number of target industries, including automotive, biotech and pharmaceuticals, chemicals, metals, and oil & gas.
Rob Williams, the company’s chief marketing officer, says Comet specializes in scheduling highly skilled workforces, whose idle time spells lost capital. “That can become a very expensive problem very quickly.”
Miles from Silicon Valley, this tech upstart hopes it has scheduled its own emergence for just the right time.
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