Object-oriented model construction in production scheduling decisions

The importance of rapid and automated model development for decision support is recognized in production scheduling applications, where problem instances are often similar to some general model but not necessarily consistent with it, and yet there is little of either time or modeling expertise available. In the modeling literature, there are few, if any, constructs of model development from component parts. Model construction is closely associated with the structure and representation of model information and with the abstraction of problem information from the user. Proceeding from a taxonomy of general production scheduling models, we develop a schema to represent model information in an object-oriented framework that relies on the definitions of natural entities, rather than on a collection of models from past experience. We show the interactions of user information with the model objects in the construction of a model to support a decision in a problem instance.