An integrated platform for distributed knowledge-based production scheduling

Production scheduling is a complex decision-making process that is becoming more important than ever in competitive markets today. However effective production scheduling remains a very challenging task and the current production scheduling systems tend to be inflexible and expensive. Although domain knowledge and information are very important to scheduling decisions, scheduling systems usually cannot effectively make use of them. In this paper A Multi-scenario Analysis (MSA) model is proposed for distributed collaborative decision-making, based on which a Multi-Scenario Analysis-based Production Scheduling Platform (MSAPSP) is developed The platform comprises a toolkit (MSADev) and an engine (MSARE) powered by a script language (EXASL). It provides a flexible and cost-effective tool to exploit domain knowledge and information for scheduling and rescheduling decisions.