Working with an intelligent assistant: experiments with a symbiotic DSS for production planning and scheduling

An intelligent assistant (LA) has been built to provide assistance to production schedulers doing production planning and scheduling in a steel mill. This system is designed as a symbiotic DSS (S/DSS), in which the core analysis tool is a commercially-developed production planning and scheduling system using a variety of heuristics and optimization routines. The IA observes the user´s use of the scheduling system and makes inferences about the user´s use. Using these inferences and the results of its own explorations utilizing a second copy of the scheduling system, the S/DSS provides advice to the user. The intelligent assistant is operational. Results of initial experiments with the system are described