Towards effective decision support for production scheduling

We present a modelling approach for a decision support system to support interactive production scheduling. The architecture of the model can be subdivided in an offline planning and an online control module. We concentrate on the offline planning in this paper. This module consists of three components: analysis, construction and evaluation used within a loop. In the analysis stage a model describing the problem at hand is interactively developed. For the scheduling problem described by this model a solution is generated in the construction phase. The solution is evaluated interactively. We use object-oriented analysis and design methods to integrate declarative representations and algorithmic solutions. A first prototype is developed to evaluate this approach