Implementing a real-time scheduling system for VLSI production

Classical scheduling theory has been far from successful in solving practical needs of the factory management. Management objectives are often many, ill-defined and changing. In general, the management is interested in a decision-support tool, facilitating specification of their objectives as they change, so that it can react to a constantly changing shop floor, making short-term and long-term planning decisions. The authors describe ReDS, which is a dynamic, intelligent and real-time factory scheduling environment. ReDS combines both artificial intelligence and operations research techniques, finding solutions which are not always optimal but acceptable to the changing needs of management