Formalising the Repair of Schedules Through Knowledge Acquisition

The generation and repair of schedules in the dynamic environment of a major UK automobile manufacturer provided challenging a testbed for real-time tools to support the schedulers. A tool was developed, described in the paper, featuring a distinction between schedule assessment and amendment, together with heuristic methods for dynamic iterative schedule repair. Some lessons were learnt on acquiring and structuring heuristic knowledge in these circumstances, with a view to selecting dynamically between the schedule repair heuristics. The paper concludes with a call for dynamic tools to assist the operators in a continued search for better understanding of their manufacturing processes and the impact of schedule changes.