Constructing and Maintaining Detailed Production Plans -- nvestigations into the Development of K-B Factory Scheduling

To be useful in practice, a factory production schedule must reflect the influence of a large and conflicting set of requirements, objectives and preferences. Human schedulers are typically overburdened by the complexity of this task, and conventional computer-based scheduling systems consider only a small fraction of the relevant knowledge. This article describes research aimed at providing a framework in which all relevant scheduling knowledge can be given consideration during schedule generation and revision. Factory scheduling is cast as a complex constraint-directed activity, driven by a rich symbolic model of the factory environment in which various influencing factors are formalized as constraints. A variety of constraint-directed inference techniques are defined with respect to this model to provide a basis for intelligently compromising among conflicting concerns. Two Bnowledge-based factory scheduling systems that implement aspects of this approach are described. FALL 1986 45 AI Magazine Volume 7 Number 4 (1986) (© AAAI)