Knowledge-Based Scheduling

Within all activities of production management, production scheduling is a major part of production planning and control. By production management we mean all activities which are necessary to carry out production. The two main activities in this field are production planning and production control. Production scheduling is a common activity of these two areas because scheduling is needed not only on the planning level — as mainly treated in the preceding chapters — but also on the control level. From the different aspects of production scheduling problems we can further distinguish predictive production scheduling or offline planning (OFP) and reactive production scheduling or online-control (ONC). Predictive production scheduling serves to provide guidance in achieving global coherence in the process of local decision making. Reactive production scheduling is concerned with revising predictive schedules when unexpected events force changes. OFP generates the requirements for ONC and ONC creates feedback to OW. The relationship between these functions are shown in Figure 9.0.1.