An evaluation function to compare alternative commitments during manufacturing planning and scheduling

Search-based approaches to scheduling require a mechanism to evaluate alternative scheduling commitments during the scheduling search process. This paper describes a domain independent evaluation function to compare alternative commitments during scheduling in both single agent and distributed scheduling problems based on cost/benefit analysis. The work extends existing search-based approaches by providing an evaluation function which can: (1) measure the global impact of a commitment on the entire schedule, and (2) evaluate commitments in distributed scheduling environments. The authors present this evaluation function in the framework of a software manufacturing problem domain which is representative of a distributed scheduling problem. A program called NEGOPRO has been implemented to test the development and reactive revision of software project schedules using the evaluation function that has been developed