Cooperative scheduling and its application to steelmaking processes

A cooperative approach to scheduling problems is proposed, and its application to creating daily schedules for steelmaking processes is described. In cooperative scheduling, procedures, rules, and the user cooperate to make a feasible schedule efficiently. The procedures, collectively called a scheduling engine, work as a local constraint satisfier to solve general primitive constraints. Rules that represent domain-dependent knowledge then solve the domain-specific constraints by means of a pattern-matching function. The user evaluates the schedule and modifies it by means of a user-friendly interface with direct-manipulation functions. The user interaction is therefore included in the system architecture as a global constraint satisfier. The iteration of this cycle improves the schedule until it becomes feasible. Experimental results obtained with Scheplan, the scheduling environment that applies this approach to scheduling steelmaking processes, show that the daily scheduling time is much less than in manual scheduling and the quality of the schedule is much improved