Abstract
Abstract
Production scheduling for flexible manufacturing needs to satisfy multiple and often conflicting criteria. The multicriteria problem is generally difficult to solve using existing heuristics without a means of combining rules and adapting them to changing circumstances.
A scheduling system incorporating an adaptive fuzzy logic system is proposed which can be tailored to suit the characteristics and objectives of an organization and maintain its performance by constantly adapting to changes in the production environment. The system developed indicates that its application shows benefits in terms of the resulting schedule performance and with respect to the simplicity of the scheduling algorithms required. The computational overhead of the fuzzy system is also shown to be insignificant, thus permitting real-time operation in a manufacturing situation.