Implementation of a case-based production scheduling system in C language

This paper presents the application of Case-Based Reasoning to the production scheduling problem in a corrugated card-board factory, its main task is to find a promising sequence for jobs processing, a prototype of the scheduling system is implemented in C language. In this system, a schedule case is represented in the form of ordered tree and each job is represented in the format of attribute-value pairs. When jobs to be sequenced are given, a previous case which is the best matching with the problem is recalled from the case-base, the sequence of given jobs can be decided assigning the jobs to the nodes of the ordered tree of the recalled case. Several real world scheduling problems in the factory have been solved and the system behaved as correctly as the human experts did. It was showed that the Case-Based Reasoning approach is well suited to solve production scheduling problems.