Using MLP networks to design a production scheduling system

This paper investigates the application of artificial neural networks to the problem of job shop scheduling with a scope of a deterministic time-varying demand pattern over a fixed planning horizon. The purpose of the research is to design and develop a job shop scheduling system (a scheduling software) that can generate effective job shop schedules using the multi-layered perceptron (MLP) networks. The contributions of this study include designing, developing, and implementing a production activity scheduling system using the MLP networks; developing a method for organizing sample data using a denotation bit to indicate processing sequence and processing time of a job simultaneously; using the back-propagation training process to control local minimal solutions; and developing a heuristics to improve and revise the initial production schedule. The proposed production activity schedule system is tested in a real production environment and illustrated in the paper with a sample case. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.