Opportunistic production planning through interactive problem solving

Some of the methodological aspects that emerged during the design of AERPLAN are presented. The system supports the medium term production planning for the seven plants of an aircraft manufacturing company. Given the tremendous amount of possible plans, an effective support must be able to make different kinds of autonomous decisions, to prune alternatives, during the plan formulation. The complexity of these composite decision processes calls for heuristic search approaches since exact methods cannot be pursued in practice. The authors describe the architectural and methodological approach adopted to cope with this open problem within AERPLAN, a system developed for ALENIA