Stephen F. Smith, Mark S. Fox and Peng Si Ow

Introduction One of the major deterrents to productivity in industry today is the inability to effectively manage and control production. The problem is particularly acute in job shop environments where plant operation is routinely characterized by high work-in-process (WIP) inventories, tardy orders, poor resource utilization, and other shop floor inefficiencies. Perhaps the single most significant obstacle to improved factory performance is the complexity associated with constructing and maintaining good production schedules. Good schedules must reflect both the full detail of the operating environment and the influence of a conflicting set of preferences that range from global organizational objectives to specific operational idiosyncrasies. Existing computer-based techniques for production scheduling are capable of incorporating only a small fraction of this scheduling knowledge and, as a result, typically produce schedules that bear little resemblance to the actual state of the ...