Expert Systems in Production Management

This paper analyzes the use of expert systems in production management and provides both an historical perspective and a review of some recently developed expert systems for production management problems. Current expert systems in production management fill two gaps associated with traditional optimization and heuristic methods. First, optimization and heuristic methods do not process semantic information. Second, optimization and heuristic methods usually are focused on a single problem or a single goal, rather than multiple interlocking problems or goals. Production expert systems attack these problems by using computer languages oriented toward processing semantic rule-based information and by coordinating the use of multiple optimization and heuristic methods in conjunction with semantic information to meet multiple goals.