Intelligent Scheduling

Book excerpt: Scheduling complex processes, such as chemical manufacturing or space shuttle launches, is a focus of substantial effort throughout industry and government. In the past 20 years, the fields of operations research and operations management have tackled scheduling problems with considerable success. Recently, the artificial intelligence community has turned its attention to this class of problems, resulting in a fresh corpus of research and application that extends previous results. This book, comprising original contributions from experts in the field, highlights these new advances. These chapters present complete systems, stressing their unique characteristics, rather than presenting simple research results. Applications-oriented chapters are also included to inform researchers of state-of-the-art methodologies. Researchers and practitioners in industry and government will find this book valuable. It will also serve as an ideal text for a graduate course in knowledge-based scheduling.