A new scheduling algorithm based on approximate reasoning formanufacturing applications

摘要

The key to efficiency of manufacturing operations is the abilityto schedule various operations involved in the process effectively. Yet,scheduling is an exercise which is not resolvable in unique logicalterms for most of the practical situations. Elimination methods, whichclassify jobs as dominant or front-runners, help to solve the problemusing branch-and-bound techniques; however, the subset of the real-lifemanufacturing problems that satisfy the conditions imposed by theelimination methods is fairly small. To improve upon the range of theirapplicability, we present a new hierarchical scheduling algorithm basedon approximate and heuristic reasoning, resembling the approachesfollowed by humans. It generates a schedule by tolerating smalldifferences in satisfying inequality conditions on processing timesrather than strict evaluation of conditions and by considering thosejobs that meet most of the conditions on processing times except one ortwo as dominant jobs with different degrees of dominance