Cooperating scheduling systems

An architecture and a procedure for communicating scheduling expert systems based on fuzzy set theory is proposed. Fuzzy sets are used to express and to exchange constraints and their potential relaxation with the cooperating scheduling system that can interpret these constraints. The procedure is intended to optimize the global evaluation among the communicating systems. An example from steel industry is taken to illustrate the approach. Here, a scheduling system of the steel making shop and that of the rolling mill try to optimize the global costs by optimizing their own schedules under the observation of the other systems constraints.