We're excited to announce the release of Cellario Scheduler™ 4.5, a significant update that expands the platform's automation capabilities, API surface, and day-to-day usability for operators and automation engineers alike. This release introduces Global Event Scripts for more scalable, protocol-independent automation logic; new Protocol Design API endpoints that enable fully programmatic workflow generation; and a suite of operator tools designed to simplify recovery, intervention, and order management.
Whether you're building adaptive Design-Make-Test-Analyze (DMTA) pipelines or simply looking for a smoother daily experience, Cellario Scheduler 4.5 delivers meaningful improvements across the board.
Cellario Scheduler now makes it easy to act the moment an order finishes or a sample fails, whether that means firing off a notification, triggering a downstream step, or logging a result to an external system. Cellario Scheduler 4.5 introduces Global Event Scripts: scripts that run automatically in response to order or operation state changes, independent of protocol design. You write the logic once, scope it with filters (by order state, operation, resource, or resource type), and Cellario Scheduler executes it everywhere it applies (Fig. 1). Two event types are supported out of the box: order state changes (Started, Finished, Paused) and sample operation changes (Started, Finished, Accepted, Repeated, Failed).
Figure 1. Example of a Global Event Script that sends a Slack message whenever any Liquid Transfer operation starts or finishes.
Previously, this logic had to be wired into each protocol individually, which could be time-consuming to maintain across a large protocol library. That challenge is now a thing of the past.
Decoupling event-driven scripting from protocol design turns your automation logic into something reusable, centrally managed, and far easier to maintain. Instead of updating the same hook in twenty protocols, you change it in one place making your automation architecture scale more seamlessly.
Cellario Scheduler 4.5 opens up protocol creation and management through a new set of Protocol Design API endpoints (/designer/protocols), enabling fully programmatic workflow generation, modification, and validation through RESTful APIs (Fig. 2; Fig. 3).
Figure 2. Screenshot of the new Designer API endpoints showing how to create, update, delete, and validated protocols.
This unlocks a new class of automation where external applications, orchestration layers, and intelligent agents can dynamically generate, modify, and optimize Cellario Scheduler protocols on the fly. Cellario Lab Assistant™ is the first to put this to use: its Protocol Generation skill turns a plain-language description of an assay or interpret an assay kit PDF into a real Cellario protocol by calling these endpoints directly, changing it from a manual design task into a conversation. The same foundation is just as open to your own software, from LIMS integrations to in-house optimization loops that adjust a protocol, run it, and refine the next iteration automatically.
It's especially powerful for DMTA workflows, where iterative cycles of experimentation, simulation, and optimization can now be automated at scale. By exposing protocol design through APIs, you can build adaptive automation environments that continuously refine workflows based on experimental outcomes, throughput constraints, scheduling analysis, or resource availability, helping accelerate scientific discovery.
Cellario has always been able to simulate an order before it runs, modeling every operation, which device it lands on, when it starts and finishes, the waits in between, and whether any critical timing constraints would be exceeded. In 4.5, all of that analysis is exposed through the REST API for the first time.
You submit a simulation with POST /orders/simulations, get back a requestId, and poll GET /orders/simulations/{requestId} until the simulation request completes, returning the same rich dataset that powers Cellario Scheduler’s built-in Run Analyzer (Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Screenshot of the new Simulation API endpoint to queue up a simulation.
Now, you can now build custom Gantt charts and analysis tools on top of live simulation data whether to analyze throughput, validate protocol designs before committing instrument time, and give you and your teams far greater transparency into what a run will actually do (Fig. 4).
Figure 4. Screenshot of an example React web app that utilizes the simulation endpoint and generates a Gantt chart.
It also lays the groundwork for a future where Lab Assistant can reason over a simulated run on your behalf, flagging throughput bottlenecks, timing risks before you commit instrument time, or factoring into your DMTA cycle by turning raw simulation data into plain-language insight.
Not every improvement in 4.5 is about APIs; some are about the people standing in front of the system at 5:30 p.m. when a run doesn't go to plan. This release delivers meaningful usability gains for operators and automation engineers, centered on the Active Plates Editor.
When something goes wrong mid-run, the old options were limited: pausing to intervene often meant halting the entire system, stopping every order on it just to address a problem with one. 4.5 makes recovery far more surgical. Operators can now pause an individual order to change it using Active Plate Editor while the rest of the system keeps working (Video 1).
Video 1. Screen recording demonstrating pausing an order to active plate edit and modify the assigned resource type to a new one.
Resource reassignment during recovery gets smarter too. Previously you could only reassign work to another instrument of the same type. Now you can reassign across any instrument that shares the required capability, for example, moving a dispense step from a MultiDrop to a PreciseDrop II™. As long as a device can do the job, you can reassign the work.
For operators, this is the difference between losing a run and saving it. Pausing one order instead of the whole system means less collateral disruption. And when the one instrument you'd normally fall back on is busy or down, you're no longer stuck, and recovery becomes a targeted, low-impact intervention instead of a system-wide stoppage. Exactly what you want when there's expensive, time-sensitive science on the deck.
Some of the best experiments are the ones you want to run again, exactly as they were. Until now, once an order Completed, that option went away leaving you to rebuild a finished experiment from scratch if you wanted to repeat it.
4.5 closes that gap. You can now find a completed order and clone it in a couple of clicks: the same protocol, samples, and parameters that worked last time, ready to run again without the manual setup and without the transcription errors that creep in when you recreate an order by hand (Video 2).
Video 2. Screen recording showing copying a completed order.
Cellario Scheduler 4.5 significantly broadens the platform's REST API surface, with new endpoints for:
Global Event Script management
System health monitoring
Enhanced logging configuration
HTTPS-secured communication
Rounding out 4.5 is a collection of smaller refinements that share a common thread: making the system more reliable, smoother for the operators who run it day-to-day, and more consistent for the developers who build against its API. Individually they're modest. Together they sand down the rough edges that show up in real-world use.
Cellario Scheduler 4.5 brings programmatic protocol design, deeper API access, and smoother recovery tools to your lab, along with the foundation that powers Cellario Lab Assistant.
Already running Cellario®? Reach out to our Support team to request your update.
Want to see it in action? To learn more or schedule a demonstration, contact us at product@highres.com. We'd love to show you what 4.5 can do for your automation workcells!
Download the release notes here.