A decision-support system for scheduling in a customer-oriented manufacturing environment

An intelligent decision-support system was designed for assessing schedulability prior to assigning parts for scheduling. This was designed as part of a larger system for intelligent real-time control, of a manufacturing system operation, where one of the system objectives was just-in-time delivery of production output. The manufacturing system was a conventional cellular manufacturing system where machines were assumed occasionally to fail. All necessary requirements for the processing of a job should actually or anticipatively be satisfied before a job is scheduled. The decision-support system attempts to satisfy these requirements. The system thus helps the decision maker to make the right decision when system and customer constraints are violated. Illustrates the operation of the system through an example.