How Blue Faces solves complex project scheduling problems in minutes with Hexaly
Blue Faces is a creative studio specializing in world-class visual effects services, collaborating with top VFX producers and supervisors worldwide. With over a decade of experience, this team of passionate artists, producers, and pipeline developers has delivered stunning VFX for feature films, music videos, commercials, animations, and games. Their expertise spans compositing, matte painting, match moving, and rotoscoping, with contributions to over 35 feature films, including Academy Award nominees like Harry Potter and Avengers. Blue Faces has also expanded into 3D CGI to meet the growing demand in film and TV.
While Blue Faces pushes the boundaries of visual storytelling, the complexity and scale of their projects present significant scheduling challenges. To address these issues, Blue Faces has entrusted Hexaly Optimizer with solving their complex project scheduling problems, thus simplifying the management of tasks across multiple projects and team members with varying skills and availability through automation and optimization.
Blue Faces’ project scheduling problem
Blue Faces’ project scheduling problem is multifaceted and involves a delicate balance of numerous constraints and objectives. The main goal is to assign a set of tasks to several assignees. Tasks may have precedence constraints, and each task has a release and due date that must be met. Each task requires a minimum skill level in its related field, such as animation, lighting, modeling, or texturing. The assignees’ skill level in each of these fields determines the set of tasks they can perform. The problem also includes complex calendar constraints. Indeed, assignees can only work on one task at a time and have precise work schedules, including holidays and breaks. Furthermore, some tasks are already preassigned to specific assignees, and these assignments are non-negotiable.
The key decisions for this problem are selecting which assignee will perform each task and determining the tasks’ start times. The objective is to minimize the makespan (latest completion time), prioritize tasks based on their importance, and reduce the overall budget (assignee wages) and the number of assignees involved.
Quick, optimal scheduling using Hexaly
Thanks to Hexaly’s innovative nonlinear and set-based formalism, the mathematical formulation is easy to write. Indeed, with interval decisions representing the time span of the tasks and list decisions representing the tasks scheduled for each assignee, the modeling is very straightforward. Moreover, Hexaly’s use of lambda expressions makes the model very compact, allowing the resolution to scale to larger instances. As a result, Hexaly models are much more straightforward and transparent than classical Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulations.
Typical instances for this project are large, with a few thousand tasks and dozens of assignees with expertise in around 15 different skill types. The time horizon is also large, as projects can span several years. Given the complexity of the task assignments, skill requirements, and calendar constraints, these large-scale instances present a significant challenge. Nevertheless, Hexaly efficiently handles the intricacies of this project, ensuring timely task completion and resource allocation across the entire time horizon.
Why Hexaly?
Before adopting Hexaly, Blue Faces relied on manual scheduling using spreadsheets. This method was time-consuming and error-prone, especially with complex projects and varying team member availability. Since using Hexaly, the team has experienced significant improvements. Automated scheduling has reduced time spent on scheduling from hours per day to just minutes, allowing the team to focus more on creative tasks. Additionally, Hexaly’s intelligent optimization has minimized the risk of missed deadlines by automatically managing task dependencies and skill requirements. This has led to better resource allocation, cost reductions, and smoother project execution. With Hexaly, Blue Faces can now handle larger and more complex projects, ensuring that deadlines and budget constraints are met without compromising the quality of their visual effects. The team was also delighted by the quality of Hexaly’s customer support, which provided quick and efficient assistance in refining models for optimal results.
Lea, you are the BEST. Thank you for such a quick response and also solution to our problem. I’m delighted with the quality of your support.
