Agilious is excited to announce that our Foreign Inspection Planning and Scheduling System (FIPSS) project for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was selected as a 2024 FORUM Innovation Award winner!
Each year, the FORUM Innovation Awards bring together both Government and Industry leaders from across the Federal Technology and Consulting communities to recognize the top IT programs nominated and selected by their peers for pushing the technology envelope, showcasing breakthrough innovation, and rewarding the leadership and teamwork that improve and advance each agency’s mission.
More about our 2024 award-winning FDA FIPSS project
The FDA conducts thousands of foreign firm inspections and relies on FDA inspectors to travel throughout the world to ensure that the fresh produce, drugs, pharmaceutical products, and medical devices entering our country are safe before they are purchased and consumed by US residents. The logistics of this travel are a monumental task. However, those logistics have been significantly optimized through the FDA’s use of the Foreign Inspection Planning and Scheduling System (FIPSS) which was developed using a sophisticated trip routing method based on the A* (pronounced A Star) routing algorithm. The A* routing algorithm has been used in various domains for path (travel trip) planning requirements, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for natural language processing and machine learning, to optimize decision-making processes.
With the implementation of FIPSS, the FDA now conducts significantly more inspections annually using the same number of resources. Ultimately, each inspection trip managed by FIPSS contributes to reducing the risk of harmful foods, devices, or drugs injuring or sickening American consumers. Before adopting the A* routing algorithm (and creation of FIPSS), the FDA used a manual, non-standardized approach to plan its foreign firm inspections. Delays in any aspect of trip planning can prevent country clearance from being obtained in a timely manner, threatening the completion of an inspection trip, and leaving unchecked risks from imported products.
Today, FIPSS continues to make an increasingly significant impact for the FDA in achieving its mission. FIPSS has allowed the FDA to increase new digital capabilities for efficient inspections, while leveraging modern cloud-native technologies for greater accessibility and scalability. The automation of the software development lifecycle, consisting of DevSecOps practices, pioneered in the development of FIPSS has enhanced the maturity of modern software development at the FDA.