A Decision Support System for Production Scheduling

ABSTRACT

Production scheduling is part of the production planning, control and execution process, which covers everything from designing to manufacturing a product. From a planning point of view, scheduling is done on an operational and shop floor level. Most of the existing information systems for production planning, and control have great deficiencies in their scheduling parts. The main reasons for this are the inherent difficulties of the arising questions like combinatorial problem complexity and the difficulty in responding quickly to a dynamic and unpredictable job shop environment (machine breakdowns, rush orders, extra work etc.). Thus shop floor planning and control must be coupled with intelligent scheduling and brought close to the objects to be scheduled. For this purpose we have designed a Decision Support System which makes appropriate use of combinatorial optimization, knowledge-based and simulation techniques to help to solve the production scheduling problem.

KEY-WORDS:

• intelligent DSS
• production
• manufacturing
• planning
• scheduling
• control