Knowledge-Based Systems Techniques and Applications in Scheduling

Scheduling problems are found in a lot of application domains. Well known is the scheduling of production where manufacturing operations have to be assigned to limited resources like machines, but also other applications are important, e.g., the scheduling of airline crews, space missions, projects in different domains, clinical surgery, even timetabling and processor scheduling include scheduling problems. In general, scheduling deals with the temporal assignment of activities to limited resources where a set of constraints has to be regarded. Due to the exponential size of scheduling problems it is quite difficult to create good or optimal schedules shown by optimized goal functions or other evaluation criteria. But not only the generation of a schedule is a hard problem, even harder and the normal case in everyday work is the adaptation of an existing schedule to the changing scheduling environment. The changes include events like resource breakdowns as well as limitations or prescriptions interactively given by the user of the scheduling system. Scheduling systems have been built to support the users in performing their scheduling tasks. The systems include scheduling knowledge as well as presentation and database components. In this chapter an overview of scheduling problems, techniques to solve scheduling problems, scheduling systems as well as research issues in scheduling is given.