Planning for the manufacturing domain: long-term and reactive scheduling

The production engineer´s knowledge and reasoning strategies about the composite manufacturing process are similar to that found in a case-based reasoning system. The intent of this paper is to demonstrate how the `cases´ or layout configurations of the production engineer can be utilized in building a more robust and realistic approach to production scheduling. A brief overview is presented of the case-based scheduling architecture. Currently, the case-based scheduler only utilizes a subset of the information available in each case, such as time to cure and amount of layup time (the time needed to hand-form the material onto the mold). However, future versions of the case matcher and scheduler could also use such case information as delta (a numerical index of oven monitoring difficulty) and number of part failures in making choices about case selection and scheduling