An AI approach to scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems

A description of an integrated intelligent simulation environment has been given. The system considers the use of an expert system (ES) to evaluate FMS simulation model data for the analysis of scheduling experimentation. A FMS model of a real system for manufacturing discrete engine components was created as a test-bed for evaluating the ES. The ES was used to analyse data from the FMS model runs and an attractive integrated environment was developed, whereby users may experiment with general `what-if´ scenarios and test the effects of adopting different scheduling policies within the FMS model framework