Author(s)

G. Henning & J. Cerda

Abstract

ESA: Expert Scheduling Assistant. A task-oriented knowledge-based expert system G. Henning & J. Cerda Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnologico para la Universidad Nacional del Literal, Giiemes 3450, 1 Introduction ESA is an interactive knowledge-based system to address the problem of short term scheduling of multiproduct batch plants having a single bottleneck stage with "n" parallel units in operation. ESA's goal is to provide a decision support environment in which schedulers can efficiently generate, explore and compare alternative schedules. Its design and construction largely relied on the concepts of prototyping, evolutionary development, and exploratory program- ming. It has been implemented in KAPPA-PC (IntelliCorp,*). The operation of multiproduct batch plants involves the satisfaction of an important number of production requirements placing competing demands on a set of limited resources, such as processing equipment, raw-materials, utilities and manpower. Sched

Keywords