An intelligent operations scheduling system in a job shop

Scheduling jobs effectively under the consideration of actual loads on machines is one of the most complicated tasks in production control. The conventional scheduling methods fail because of the complexity of the tasks. To deal with the complexity, knowledge-based approaches to job shop scheduling have been attempted. This paper presents an interactive scheduling expert system, IOSS (Intelligent Operations Scheduling System), which performs both predictive and reactive scheduling. IOSS combines the knowledge-based scheduling method with the interactive scheduling method to generate a feasible schedule and to revise the existing schedule. It is based on opportunistic and interactive repair based problem solving within a blackboard architecture. To handle conflicting events, heuristics are applied from the order point of view. Flexible reaction management is possible while keeping the changes in the generated schedule to a minimum by adjusting the schedule for tardy operations or changes in job shop status. The effectiveness of the proposed concept is demonstrated by applying the developed system to an example case.