Optimization tool for short-term production planning and scheduling

A decision support system for short-term production planning and scheduling is presented. The system consists of three modules: an expert system module, an optimization module and a dialog module. The rules defined in the expert module are used to reduce the space searched by the multicriteria genetic algorithm implemented in the optimization module. A set of experiments showed that reducing the search space increases the efficiency of the applied heuristics. Finally, the dialog module supports the decision maker in choosing the best compromise solution from the set of potentially Pareto-optimal solutions generated by the optimization module.