Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 13, 253±260, 2002

# 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands.

Expert systems in production planning and

scheduling: A state-of-the-art survey
K . S . M E TA X I O T I S , D I M I T R I S A S KO U N I S and J O H N P S A R R A S
Institute of Communications and Computer Systems, National Technical University of Athens,
Athens, Greece
E-mail: Kmetax@epu.ntua.gr

Received August 2000 and accepted April 2001

Intelligent solutions, based on expert systems, to solve problems in the ®eld of production planning
and scheduling are becoming more and more widespread nowadays. Especially the last decade has
witnessed a growing number of manufacturing companies, including glass, oil, aerospace,
computers, electronics, metal and chemical industriesÐto name just a fewÐinterested in the
applications of expert systems (ESs) in manufacturing. This paper is a state-of-the-art review of the
use of ESs in the ®eld of production planning and scheduling. The paper presents famous expert
systems known in the literature and current applications, analyzes the relative bene®ts and concludes
by sharing thoughts and estimations on ESs future prospects in this area.
Keywords: Expert systems, arti®cial intelligence, production planning, scheduling, intelligent
manufacturing

1. Introduction adopt intelligent solutions. Expert systems (ESs)

In recent years manufacturing industry has experi-
enced an unprecedented degree of change; global
competition, shortened product life cycle, changes in
management, increasing requirements for quality,
increasing customer expectations, faster-paced
advances in complex technology and rapidly
expanding options in materials and processes. A
great challenge for today's companies is not only how
to adapt to this changing business environment but
also how to draw a competitive advantage from the
way in which they choose to do so. As a basis to
achieve such advantages, companies have started to
seek to optimize the operation of their manufacturing
systems. Since traditional, centralized manufacturing
planning, scheduling and control mechanisms were
found insuf®ciently ¯exible to respond to this new
situation, many manufacturing companies decided to
technology provides a natural way to overcome such
problems, and to design and implement distributed
intelligent manufacturing environments.
In the past decade there has been a virtual explosion
of interest in the ®eld known as expert systems (or,
alternatively, as knowledge-based systems). Expert
systems provide powerful and ¯exible means for
obtaining solutions to a variety of problems that often
cannot be dealt with by other, more orthodox
methods. One relative study reported an investment
of over $100 million in AI research by large American
manufacturing companies, some of which have
already achieved impressive results (Dornan, 1987).
Typical examples are Digital Equipment
Corporation's XCON, Boeing and Lockheed-
Georgia Corporation's GenPlan.
On the other hand, many researchers and authors
have strongly supported the view that expert systems
254
can make a signi®cant contribution to improving
control and manufacturing systems (Wilson, 1985;
Shaw and Whinston, 1986). This paper comes to review
the use of expert systems in the area of production
planning and scheduling. In the following sections, we
present concepts and characteristics of famous expert
systems in this area, the bene®ts gained through their
utilization and estimations on the future trends.
2. The expert systems technology
ESs are one of the most commercially successful
branches of arti®cial intelligence (AI). Welbank
(1983) de®nes an expert system as follows:
An expert system is a program which has a wide
base of knowledge in a restricted domain, and uses
complex inferential reasoning to perform tasks
which a human expert could do.
In other words, an ES is a computer system containing
a well-organized body of knowledge which emulates
expert problem solving skills in a bounded domain of
expertise. The system is able to achieve expert levels
of problem solving performance, which would
normally be achieved by a skilled human when
confronted with signi®cant problems in the domain
(BCS, Expert Systems Specialist Group). As illu-
strated in Fig. 1, an ES consists of three main
components, which include the knowledge base, the
inference engine and the user interface.
The knowledge base is the heart of the system and
Fig. 1. Expert system's architecture.
Metaxiotis, Askounis and Psarras
contains the knowledge needed for solving a speci®c
problem. The knowledge may be in the form of facts,
heuristics (e.g. experiences, opinions, judgments,
predictions, algorithms) and relationships usually
gleaned from the mind of experts in the relevant
domain. Knowledge can be represented using a
variety of representation techniques (e.g. semantic
nets, frames, predicate logic) (Badiru, 1992; Ignizio,
1991; Mital and Anand, 1994), but the most
commonly used technique is ``If-Then'' rules, also
known as production rules.
The inference engine is employed during a
consultation session, examines the status of the
knowledge base, handles the content of the knowledge
base and determines the order in which inferences are
made. It may use various inference methods (Badiru,
1992; Ignizio, 1991; Mital and Anand, 1994).
The user interface part enables interaction of the
system with the user. It mainly includes screen
displays, a consultation/advice dialogue and an
explanation component. In addition, expert systems
provide interfaces for communication with external
programs including databases and spreadsheets.
ESs have some signi®cant advantages in compar-
ison with the traditional computer systems. These
advantages are presented in the following Table 1.
Concerning the development of ESs, there are
mainly two groups of development tools (Baker,
1988; Huntington, 1985; Jackson, 1986):
* High level programming languages (C ‡‡,
PROLOG, LISP, etc.). Using these languages,
the system designer has a great deal of freedom
in his choice of knowledge representation
techniques and control strategies. However,
use of these languages requires a high degree
of expertise and skill.
* Expert system shells. They attempt to combine
the ¯exibility of AI languages with the cost-
effectiveness and provide more general devel-
opment facilities. There are a number of
commercial shells available in the market with
varying features (Nexpert Object, XpertRule,
KnowledgePro, CLIPS, ReSolver, EXSYS, VP-
Expert, ACQUIRE, etc.). Most of them are
relatively low priced and provide a rule-based
knowledge representation mechanism.
In general, the success of an ES depends on how much
knowledge it has and how qualitative that knowledge
is.
Expert systems in production planning 255

Table 1. Expert systems' advantages

Availability
Experts are not born. They have to be trained and then practiced. It generally takes over ®ve years for someone to acquire
expertise in a particular area. In contrast to the human, expert system has all the expertise inside, it never gets tired or
dies. The included knowledge is often more readily available to trainee experts or users.

Consistency
Even the best experts can make mistakes or may forget an important point. Once an expert system is programmed to ask
for and use certain inputs, it is not prone to forgetfulness. If a line of reasoning is acceptable, it will remain so in different
consultations.

Comprehensiveness
An expert can only draw upon his own knowledge and experience. In some domains an expert systems could encapsulate
the knowledge of more than one expert and consequently offer several options.

3. Expert systems towards production planning
and scheduling
Planning and scheduling are forms of decision-
making, which play a crucial role in manufacturing
as well as in service industries. Planning is the process
of selecting and sequencing activities such that they
achieve one or more goals and satisfy a set of domain
constraints. Scheduling is the process of selecting
among alternative plans and assigning resources and
times to the set of activities in the plan. These
assignments must obey a set of rules or constraints
that re¯ect the temporal relationships between
activities and the capacity limitations of a set of
shared resources (Artiba, 1997; Brucker, 1998;
Pinedo, 1995).
In the current competitive environment, effective
planning and scheduling has become a necessity for
survival in the marketplace. Companies have to meet
shipping dates committed to the customers, as failure
to do so may result in a signi®cant loss of good will
and reliability. They also should schedule activities in
such a way as to use the resources available in an
ef®cient way. In this framework manufacturing
companies decided to adopt intelligent solutions,
since the traditional manufacturing planning and
scheduling mechanisms were found insuf®ciently
¯exible to respond to changing production styles
and highly dynamic variations in product require-
ments (Meredith et al., 1994; Kusiak, 1990).
A mid-1990s survey reported by Durkin (1996) has
revealed manufacturing industry to be one of the most
widely applied area for expert systems. On the other
hand, Wong et al. (1994) implemented a study in 1993
examining the current utilization of ESs and their
bene®ts in manufacturing among the 500 largest
industrial companies in the USA. They invited all
Fortune 500 industrial corporations (based on the
1990 ranking) to participate in a mail survey. The
mailing procedure produced 98 usable responses in
total, which meant a usable response rate of 19.6%.
Among the 98 responding companies, the mean
number of employees was 19,000, while gross
annual sales averaged 6.2 billion dollars. In this
study, scheduling emerged as the most common
application area of ESs, as shown in the Table 2.
In an other study implemented by Byrd (1995), who
interviewed 74 knowledge engineers (KEs) of 28
organizations, production scheduling appeared to be
the second most common type of ES in general, the
®rst being diagnosis. Table 3 gives an indication of
how many ESÐrelated to production managementÐ
was in use and being developed in the 28 organiza-
tions of the KEs.
Concerning the bene®ts reported from the use of
this technology by the KEs, the interviewees said they
received from their ESs:
* Better customer service
* Reduction in time to complete tasks
* Organizational learning
* Increases in production
* More effective use of resources
* Reduction in staff
Moreover, many researchers have regularly written
about the use of ESs in production planning and
256 Metaxiotis, Askounis and Psarras

Table 2. Areas of ES applicationsÐSurvey of Wong et al. 4. Application of ESs in production planning and
(1994) scheduling
System domain Frequency Percentage1
A number of applications of ESs to the area of
Scheduling 18 35.3 production planning and scheduling have been
Process design 16 31.4 developed and documented. The intelligent sche-
Maintenance and repair 15 29.4 duling and information system (ISIS) was the ®rst
Process selection 13 25.5 application of ES to job-shop scheduling (Fox and
Facility layout 11 21.6 Smith, 1984). ISIS used hierarchical planning to
Material selection 6 11.8
decompose complex problems into manageable
Production planning and control 4 7.8
Capacity planning 4 7.8 pieces. The research with ISIS led to work on the
Facility location 3 5.9 development of the opportunistic scheduler (OPIS)
Project management 3 5.9 (Ow and Smith, 1986), a knowledge-based factory
Tool selection 2 3.9 scheduling system which uses problem decomposi-
Data selection 2 3.9 tions to generate constraint-satisfying shop schedules.
Quality control 2 3.9 The prototype expert priority scheduler (PEPS)
Forecasting 2 3.9 (Robbins, 1985) is a rule-based ES which solves
Storeroom design 1 2.0 problems in shop ¯oor control level, although its
Vendor selection 1 2.0 drawback is the fact that it is not able to recognize
1
Percentages do not add up to 100 because the respond- uncertainty and downstream data dependency.
ents could choose more than one area of application. PATRIARCH (Morton et al., 1984) is a multilevel
planning, scheduling and control system that was
scheduling and the potential bene®ts of them (Coursey developed at Carnegie Mellon University for manu-
and Shangraw, 1989; Ehner and Bax, 1983; Jayaraman facturing. The four levels of the PATRIARCH system
and Srivastava, 1996; Kanet and Adelsberger, 1987; include: (1) strategic planning, (2) capacity planning,
Kusiak and Chen, 1988; Liu, 1985; Mertens and Kanet, (3) scheduling, (4) dispatching. The OPT scheduling
1986; Meziane et al., 2000; Pereira, 1996; Pham and system was reported by Jacobs (1983).
Pham, 1999; Zhang and Chen, 1999). According to A hybrid expert system HESS (Deal et al., 1992)
these researchers, ES can help organizations to cut was developed at the University of Houston in support
costs by reducing the need for some personnel, of product scheduling at a major petrochemical ®rm's
preserve and disseminate scarce expertise throughout re®nery. The knowledge base in HESS was developed
the organization, give better consistency to decision to determine what products to produce at what time,
making, improve quality of products. and through which processors. HESS was developed
using the EXSYS expert system shell and consists of
Table 3. Total number of ES used and being developedÐ approximately 400 production rules.
Study of Byrd (1995) A management analysis resource scheduler MARS
(Marsh, 1985) has been developed to schedule
Status Number of ESs
resources for the space transportation system.
Currently used Chiodini (1980) developed an expert system for
0 1 dynamic manufacturing rescheduling, while Biegel
1±5 15 and Wink (1989) proposed an expert system for
6±10 6 industrial job-shop scheduling.
11±40 3 A knowledge-based simulation system for manu-
4 40 2
facturing scheduling was proposed by Palaniswami
Being developed
0 0 and Jenicke (1992), while Alexander (1987) devel-
1±5 13 oped an expert system for the selection of scheduling
6±10 7 rules in a job shop.
11±40 1 A knowledge-based simulation model for job shop
4 40 4 scheduling was also proposed by Abdallah (1995).
The knowledge base of the model was built using the
Expert systems in production planning 257

Table 4. Summary list of projects using expert systems technology

Project Group Domain

MASCOT Parunak, 1993 Manufacturing scheduling and control
ITI
DAS Burke and Prosser, 1991 Manufacturing scheduling
University of Strathclyde
ABACUS McEleney et al., 1998 Manufacturing scheduling
UCB, UMIST
MetaMorph II Shen et al., 1998 Intelligent manufacturing production
University of Calgary
SFA Parunak, 1996 Manufacturing scheduling and control
NCMS
A case based expert system Wong, 1997 Manufacturing planning
for generative computer-aided MSERC
process planning with
manufacturing uncertainty
IAO Kwok and Norrie, 1994 Intelligent manufacturing
University of Calgary

simulation technique by studying the effect of
different technological factors on the selection of
scheduling decisions.
De Toni et al. (1996) proposed an intelligence-
based production scheduler, which utilizes a hybrid
push/pull approach to schedule. This scheduler uses
some blackboard techniques of the type hypothesized
by Hayes-Roth (1985). The production-scheduling
blackboard consists of frames, lists and production
rules, plus a blackboard controller with a shop ¯oor
control system interface and codes/routings archives.
Custodio et al. (1994) discussed the issue of
production planning and scheduling using a fuzzy
decision system, while several outlines concerning the
development of a rule-base for the speci®cation of
manufacturing planning and control systems were
recently made by Howard et al. (2000).
A fuzzy rule-based scheduler was proposed by
Subramaniam et al. (2000), which dynamically
selects, from several candidate dispatching rules, the
most appropriate dispatching rule to employ, based on
the prevailing job shop conditions. An expert system
named KDPAG was built by Chen et al. (1998)
applied to materials design and manufacture.
In addition, particular attention is also dedicated to
the issue of effective rescheduling (Brown, 1989;
Sarin and Salgame, 1989; Szelke and Kerr, 1994).
Yamamoto and Nof (1985) suggested a Regeneration
Method when they exploited production schedule
expert system. Driscoll (1993) studied a knowledge-
based rescheduling expert system which was adapted
to the ¯exible manufacturing environment, while
Tayanlthi et al. (1992) proposed a knowledge-based
simulation system to analyze and handle the dis-
turbances (including machine breakdowns and rush
orders) in a ¯exible manufacturing environment.
Recently a production rescheduling expert simula-
tion system was also proposed by Li et al. (2000). This
system integrates different techniques and methods,
including simulation technique, arti®cial neural net-
work, expert knowledge and dispatching rules and
deals with four sources of production disturbances: (a)
incorrect work, (b) machine breakdowns, (c) rework
due to quality problems; and (d) rush orders.
During this survey's literature research, we found
some research projects using expert systems tech-
nology for manufacturing planning, scheduling and
execution control. Table 4 presents a summary of
these projects.
5. Conclusions/recommendations
It is sure that the manufacturing enterprises of the 21st
century will be in an environment where markets are
frequently shifting, new technologies are continu-
ously emerging and competitors are multiplying
globally. Manufacturing strategies should therefore
shift to support global competitiveness, new product
innovation and rapid market responsiveness. The next
258
generation manufacturing systems will thus be more
strongly time-oriented, while still focusing on cost
and quality.
The ®ndings of this survey show that ESs are
generally perceived to be very useful in production
planning and scheduling (Kumura et al., 1986;
Liebowitz and Lightfoot, 1987). ES are becoming
more and more common decision-making tools in
many organizations. The bene®ts reported from the
use of ESs in this area include more accurate
decisions, time gains, improved quality and more
ef®cient use of resources. It is our belief that the
usefulness of ESs in production planning and
scheduling will gain more recognition, if they are
properly integrated with operations research (OR)
techniques, especially simulation. Sabuncuoglu and
Hommertzheim (1989) have observed major bene®ts
provided by expert simulation systems.
Most of the ESs that have been discussed and
developed are essentially stand-alone systems.
However, it is very likely that in the near future a
large portion of the ESs developed will be embedded
systems, that is, systems which form a part of the
overall software package. Hybrid ESs are one
example of such an approach. Since most operations
management problemsÐin generalÐare not isolated
problems by their nature, isolated ESs can not solve
exactly the problem of the manufacturing manager.
On the other hand, it must be pointed out that top
management plays a pivotal role in the productive
implementation of ESs. Grindley (1988) reported that
some executives have never even heard of the term
``expert system'', while others have different percep-
tions of what an ES is or does and to what extent their
expectations can be realized. There is no doubt that
lack of knowledge about ESs often results in a lack of
interest in utilization. In some cases top management
do not support ES projects because they see the
computer as a tool solely for ®nancial and accounting
applications. So, in order to ensure success, top
management should show a genuine interest in
exploring the applications of ESs in manufacturing
planning and scheduling.
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