Acquisition of Scheduling Rules by Inductive Learning and Rule Based Local Search

It is important in developing intelligent scheduling systems to build an effective method for acquisition of decision rules. We have proposed a method for acquisition of scheduling rules by using inductive learning. Cases needed for rule acquisition are generated by interchanging two jobs in a sample schedule, and job attributes and location properties of jobs are used as the basic information for the rule acquisition. The proposed method for rule acquisition has been applied to single machine problems and flowshop problems.This paper extends the authors' previous work to jobshop scheduling problems and describes a method to acquire scheduling rules by generating a number of sample schedules and analyzing their properties. The effectiveness of the proposed method for rule acquisition and the applicability of such obtained rules are demonstrated by applying them to the exploration process of local search.