An Architecture for Real-Time Distributed Scheduling

Khosrow Hadavi, Wen-Ling Hsu, Tony Chen, and Cheoung-Nam Lee Industrial managers, engineers, and technologists have many expectations from artificial intelligence and its application to knowledge-based systems. Although the past decade has witnessed a number of innovative applications of AI in manufacturing, the field is still in its infancy and holds even greater promise for the future. The AAAI Press book Artificial Intelligence Applications in Manufacturing, (from which the following article was selected) presents a number of articles that relate to the enhancement of planning and decision making capabilities in today's automated production environments. Scheduling problems can generally be described as allocating resources to tasks while satisfying a set of constraints (Baker 1974; Conway et al. 1967). More often than not, the constraint sets are large and diverse, the objectives conflict with each other, and the scheduling problems quickly become NPhard.