Knowledge-Based Design of Scheduling Systems

A Scheduling system shall support the human scheduler in his daily work in creating and revising schedules of the production. Several criteria influence the requirements for such a system, e.g., the area of production and the preferences of the producing company as well as the need for presentation of specific information and sophisticated scheduling algorithms. Most of the existing scheduling systems have been built from scratch. To improve the building of scheduling systems an intelligent support system for the implementation of hybrid scheduling systems is presented which integrates different scheduling techniques, knowledge about their appropriateness for specific problem scenarios and knowledge about the design of scheduling systems. Using this knowledge it helps the user designing adequate scheduling systems for different application scenarios.