An intelligent interactive support system for short- and mid-term planning in a production planning and control system

Although production planning and control systems were developed and used for about thirty years, a whole bunch of problems remains unresolved. Simple data management tasks – like retrieval and manipulation of master data concerning products, orders, staff, machines and stocks – are handled quite well. However the more complex task of creating or adapting production schedules is not yet satisfactorily solved in systems currently available on the market. Intelligent knowledge based systems supporting but not replacing the human planner, are a promising approach to solve this task. We propose a support system that covers the whole range from completely interactive scheduling and rescheduling to totally automatic plan generation. In one extreme the human planner may completely construct the schedule in an interactive graphical environment whereas the system only checks the production requirements. For automatic plan generation the system applies constrained based heuristic search and an anytime variant of heuristic repair.