Mixed-Initiative Management of Integrated Process-Planning and Production-Scheduling Solutions

Increased reliance on agile manufacturing techniques has created a demand for systems to solve integrated process-planning and production-scheduling problems in lasge-scale dynamic environments. To be effective, these systems hould provide useroriented interactive functionality for managing the various user tasks and objectives and reacting to unexpected vents. This paper describes the mixed-initiative problem-solving features of IP3S. an Integrated Process-Planning/Production-Scheduling shell for agile manufacturing. IP3S is a b/ackb0ard-based ystem that supports the concurrent devdopment and dynamic revision of integrated process-planning and production-scheduling solutions and the maintenance of multipk problem instances and solutions, as well as other flexible user-oriented decision-making capabilities, allowing the user to control the scope of the problem and explore alternate tradeoffs (~what-if" scenarios) interactively. The system is scheduled for initial deployment and evaluation in a large and highly dynamic machine shop at Raytheon’s Andover manufacturing facility.