INDUSTRY NEWS

Rules and optimization:
Powerful combo for faster resource planning
Companies are discovering the formidable combination of ILOG JRules and ILOG CPLEX for greatly accelerating and refining resource allocation and scheduling.

ILOG is in the unique position of offering the best business rule and optimization software components, and all the services - consulting, training and customer support - needed to fully benefit from its products.

Its business rule components - ILOG Rules and ILOG JRules -- are widely used to automate the application of policies and regulations. Companies in industries such as communications, transportation, banking and investment increasingly rely on business rules to improve mission-critical operations, including order fulfillment, account personalization, portfolio and securities management. ILOG business rule products allow companies to rapidly model problems, process data and implement changes to existing systems.

ILOG CPLEX and ILOG's other optimization products come with similar credentials. They let the user fully model an operation and quickly find an optimal solution for planning operations and committing resources.

Marriage of technologies
Using ILOG JRules with ILOG CPLEX enables companies to screen data before applying it to manage resources. Information from various sources, including the Web, can be checked by an ILOG JRules-based application. Only the information essential to optimizing an operation reaches the ILOG CPLEX solution.

The reduced problem size provided by ILOG JRules and the unequaled speed of ILOG CPLEX result in unprecedented solution times. Already a customer has reported a solution time of less than 10 seconds for a complex operation that used to take hours to perform.

The ILOG JRules-ILOG CPLEX combination has found homes in the airline industry, scheduling crews for 2,700 daily flights at Southwest Airlines, and the Internet, placing ads in streaming video for Sony PaSaTa. It is also being used by a growing number of financial services to manage complex investment strategies.