Satisfying conflicting objectives in factory scheduling

The current state of research into, and implementation of, knowledge-based scheduling techniques is described. An investigation into the role of predictive techniques in building and maintaining good, balanced schedules is presented. Several different ways of constructing, propagating, and using predictive knowledge, such as a simple capacity plan or a more complicated probabilistic analysis, are outlined, and test results are compared. An approach to resolving the problem of conflicting objectives is presented. The approach combines the information provided by a probabilistic analysis with the ability to represent the influencing constraints and reason about the dependencies between them. It is shown that predictive information is extremely useful in focusing the attention of the scheduler on to the most constrained parts of the schedule