Knowledge-based reactive scheduling

Abstract

Reactive scheduling has emerged as a new concept in production planning and control over the past few years. It is attracting the increased interest of both academic and industrial researchers in developing available knowledge-based techniques in real-time shop floor control applications and providing advanced tools for subsequent industrial applications. In this paper, we provide an overview of research results in the domain of knowledge-based reactive scheduling and some related industrial applications. Since reactive scheduling is a new and not well-defined paradigm, we start by examining some definitions of the problem given by different practitioners in the field. We then examine alternative knowledge-representation technologies and reasoning approaches which, because of t heir flexibility and reactive capability, are often applied in real-time decision-making environments. This is followed by a review of some reported industrial applications, and a summary on major areas for further research, which gives a picture of the width of the gap between the results of current research and their application in practice. Finally, some major trends apparent in the domain are outlined.

Keywords:

• knowledge-based systems
• reactive scheduling
• handling uncertainties
• shop floor control
• real-time decision-making