The dynamic rescheduler: conquering the changing production environment

The dynamic rescheduler (DR) is an automated assistant for managing change and adjusting an active schedule to accommodate events in the production environment. The application provides a shop-floor supervisor with an intelligent rescheduling assistant that is capable of considering more alternatives in a limited amount of time than is manually possible. This intelligent aid uses techniques of hypothetical reasoning and constraint-based rescheduling to generate alternative adjusted schedules. Using heuristics and rescheduling knowledge, DR generates alternatives, tests them for feasibility, and evaluates them against the current set of goals. The application allows a supervisor to react intelligently and on a timely basis to changes on the shop floor. The author describes the reactive scheduling problem, investigates alternative solutions to the problem, and discuss the architecture, knowledge, and processing details of the dynamic rescheduler solution