A decision support system for production scheduling and its application

A decision support system for a wide class of production scheduling problems has been developed in this paper. It comprises 3 main components, i.e. the shell, knowledge acquisition mechanism and inference engine. The inference engine is based on a two level optimization model. Because there are several objectives in general production scheduling problems, the preference order dynamic programming is adopted. This system has been applied to the production scheduling of the Anshan Iron and Steel Works, China.