MESA: Managing work crew assignments by constraint based schedule generation

MESA, the Maintenance Engineering Scheduling Assistant is a system that generates assignments of repair crews to work orders on a particular date. A task analysis of the maintenance domain in steelmaking guides system design. MESA provides extensive interactive facilities for editing, maintaining and coordinating a schedule, human resources and machine downtimes. The system generates an initial schedule, using temporal constraint propagation and heuristic search techniques. The search techniques are generic and well parameterized. Some results of parameter variation are described, together with proposed extensions to allow dynamic rescheduling