Knowledge Based Production Planning and Scheduling

Abstract

One of the topics of the EUREKA project PROTOS (Prolog Tools for Building Expert Systems) [Appelrath 87] is the development of a Prolog-based system that exploits heuristic knowledge for a concrete scheduling application from the chemical industry. The term scheduling designates the problem of chronological allocation of a given set of production orders to the apparatuses available taking into account certain secondary conditions and goals. By the approach pursued in PROTOS Prolog in general and special Prolog tools for the solution of specific production planning and control (PPC) problems are evaluated. Approaches to the scheduling problem suggested so far are mainly based on the conventional operations research methods [Bedworth 87]; first of all they have two shortcomings: -- High runtime complexity of the algorithms. This problem is due to the combinatorial complexity of the problem domain when practical qu..