Adaptive production planning environments using decision rules and simulation

Planning is a difficult task for human beings and for computers. The author focuses on one aspect of planning activities called short term production planning or sequencing and scheduling. Sometimes, the term operational planning is also used. An architecture for a Production Planning Environment (PPE) that solves part of the problems is presented. Those most important components of PPE are: administrative support; scheduling support; rescheduling support; simulation feedback; analysis of feedback from the production; maintenance of decision models; maintenance of the simulation model, and control of the production department