Scheduling environment for steel-making processes.

A practical approach is proposed to actual scheduling problems, and its application to creating daily schedules for steel-making processes is described. Cooperative scheduling is a novel paradigm in which procedures, rules, and the user cooperate to make a feasible schedule efficiently. The procedures, collectively called a scheduling engine, work as a local constraint satisfier to solve general primitive constraints. Rules that represent domain-dependent knowledge then solve the domain-specific constraints by a pattern-matching function. Finally, the user evaluates the schedule and modifies it using a user-friendly interface with direct-manipulation functions. The user interaction is therefore included in the system architecture as a global constraint satisfier. The iteration of this cycle improves the schedule until it becomes feasible. Scheplan is a scheduling environment that applies this approach to scheduling steel-making processes.