Bridging the Gap Between Automation and Optimization

Contributed by: Ari Siesser, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Automation Intelligence, A Gurobi Alliance Partner

Traditionally, there’s been a huge disconnect between automation and optimization. The future for us is bridging that gap.

We focus on optimizing industrial automation. So when you think about manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, e-commerce fulfillment facilities, there are a lot of opportunities to leverage optimization to get more out of those facilities. What we are excited about doing is helping folks get more out of what they already have without having to buy any additional hardware.

Even a 5% improvement can mean big dollars. As we start to look at optimizing decisions with respect to automation, we’re going to see tremendous increases in efficiency across the supply chain. And in order to solve these operational optimization problems, Gurobi is critical. 

The cool thing about how we operate is that optimization is a foundation for our products, and we have a big professional services team that develops simulations of highly automated facilities so we can show our customers: ‘This is your operation. Here are the orders that you processed yesterday. Here’s how long it took to process the orders with your logic; now, let’s swap out that logic with our optimized version, and I can show you the difference.’ And they can watch it in 3D and see it happen live.