Department of Defense enlists Red Hat to enhance squadron operations and flight training

Red Hat announced that the Department of Defense (DoD) worked with Red Hat to help improve aircraft and pilot scheduling for United States Marine Corps (USMC), United States Navy (USN) and United States Air Force (USAF) aircrews. 

Using modern development practices and processes from Red Hat Open Innovation Labs that prioritized end user needs, the project team identified unaddressed roadblocks and gained new skills to build the right solution, a digital "Puckboard" application, for their unique scheduling challenge.

The problem facing squadrons was seemingly straightforward: how to improve and digitize the management of flight training operations. The existing process was entirely manual, each representing pertinent information like a pilot’s name, associated with their training syllabus, location and time of flights. 

Simple at a glance, the number of cognitive variables contained within this undertaking made it stressful for the operator and difficult to scale across squadrons and bases.

For more than a decade, various project teams within the DoD had tried to improve the system via custom built applications, aircraft scheduling software and hybrid solutions. None of these deployments withstood the test of time or could be replicated if the operator took a new role elsewhere. The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), an organization tasked with accelerating commercial technologies into the military, took on this challenge.

To help understand the holistic problem and not just discrete elements, a cross-functional team from DIU, USMC, USN and USAF engaged with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, a DevOps and open source residency program guided by Red Hat’s Global Services experts. 

During the immersive, human-centered design engagement, Red Hat experts worked alongside the project team to evaluate and validate the problem space and develop a strategic approach for creating a new flight scheduling system. What became clear was that with the variety of planes and pilots facing each operator, each with their own requirements, any ultimate solution would need to address all of these variables, not just a handful.

Beyond helping the team identify the core underlying problem for end users, Red Hat Open Innovation Labs helped provide guidance and strategies for more effective application development within the associated USAF, USN and USMC groups. This led to the replacement of the traditional waterfall approach with an agile methodology, lean product development and DevOps practices that are more adaptive. 

The skills and tools gained from the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs engagement has enabled the project team to lay the groundwork for a flight scheduling solution that isn’t tied to a single person or unscalable technology. 

But perhaps most importantly, the team is now able to share their knowledge and processes across their organizations with the intent to build an internal open source pipeline of not just technology, but also open practices that can help shorten development cycles and bring usable applications to end users faster.

With the digital "Puckboard" application in development, the project team now hopes to be able to more effectively capture data that was previously disparate or not captured at all (like on a puck or whiteboard). By enabling a digital transformation of the manual flight scheduling process, the USMC, USN and USAF hope to add artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) predictive capabilities to the solution, providing even more efficiency to the process.

"Application development for mission-critical processes, like United States Armed Forces flight scheduling, needs to start at a fundamental level by understanding and addressing the real problem,” said Michael Walker, global senior director at Red Hat Open Innovation Labs. “The USMC, USN and USAF, along with the DIU, knew the reality of the challenge facing them and, with the help of Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, now have not only the technological skills but also the development and organizational processes in place to build a solution that can scale across organizations and teams."

Red Hat Process Automation enables cloud-native UI development with micro-frontend architecture

Red Hat announced latest release of its Red Hat Process Automation, unveiling new applied artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for predictive decision modeling, and support for the development of process- and decision-based business applications using micro-frontend architectures. Together with additional enhancements targeted at improving the overall user experience for Red Hat Process Automation customers, these capabilities further strengthen the business developer’s toolbox.

Red Hat Process Automation is a set of products for automating business decisions and processes by enabling closer collaboration between IT and business teams. This helps IT organizations to better capture and enforce business policies and procedures, automate business operations and measure the results of business activities across heterogeneous environments including physical, virtual, mobile and cloud.

Red Hat Process Automation also supports an applied AI approach to automated decisioning. This enables users to incorporate predictive analytics into their decision management applications to create intelligent, automated systems that help them better interpret and respond to changing market dynamics.

With the latest release of Red Hat Process Automation, customers can import and execute predictive models expressed in Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), an industry standard for integrating and exchanging information between machine learning (ML) platforms where the predictive models are created and trained, and decision management applications that use such models to automate rules for specific business outcomes.

By incorporating predictive capabilities within a Decision Model and Notation (DMN) decision model, users can not only analyze and act on data in an automated way, but also gain greater visibility into how an automated system reached a given conclusion. This transparency and control contribute to a more explainable AI and can help organizations better address regulatory requirements such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which includes specific provisions that support a right to explanation for automated decisioning.

The latest release of Red Hat Process Automation delivers improvements to improve the overall user experience. 

Level two Operators simplify the deployment and management of Red Hat Process Automation on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform by providing automated lifecycle management capabilities for installation, minor version upgrades and patches. Using OpenShift Operators, customers can minimize operations workloads, keep installations up-to-date and reduce unplanned downtime.

It provides new capabilities, including heat maps, make it easier for users to visualize commonly used process pathways and bottlenecks. The complex event processing engine can be configured to operate across multiple nodes to enable continuous operation in the event of a node failure. 

High availability support for the business central component on Red Hat OpenShift is available as a technology preview in this release, providing further protection against data loss in the event that the OpenShift node supporting the business central instance fails. Node failure will not interrupt a user’s session or cause a loss of BPMN, DMN or other artifact that the user is working on.

The release provides customizable templates in the business optimizer for common constraint satisfaction use cases, based on the upstream OptaPlanner community project.

The latest release of Red Hat Process Automation is available now.