A knowledge based architecture for incremental scheduling

A report is presented on the development of CIBELE, a knowledge-based system (KBS) for the resolution of scheduling problems. Scheduling is an area in which traditional systems have often achieved poor results, mainly because of the large amount of knowledge that has to be taken into account and of the lack of a clearly understood resolution strategy. KBS technology, suggesting methodologies and techniques for heterogeneous knowledge integration and principles for building flexible problem solving architectures, lends itself as a promising tool for improving scheduling system performance. In particular, CIBELE is concerned with the examination of a scarcely investigated technique for schedule building, based on `debugging´, i.e. on the stepwise treatment of the problem constraints. This approach is evaluated and contrasted with other approaches