A rule based planning and scheduling system for manufacturing industries

This paper discusses how the need for improved performance in manufacturing organizations leads to a requirement for many planning and scheduling related applications. For small to medium batch production these applications can use a common architecture based on fifth generation computing concepts and a typical application (workcell scheduler) is described in some detail. The structure of the supervision system for a manufacturing organization can be viewed at two levels to show a global view of decision and information flow between the activities of the organization and also the internal structure of a decision making activity. The global view adopted in this paper is the decision grid and the internal structures use a common CIM reference model. Finally, the MOPPS (model based production planning and scheduling) toolkit to support the construction of software for these applications, that has been successfully tested and used, has been outlined