Constraint-oriented cooperative scheduling for aircraft manufacturing

The flanged element manufacturing workshop at Dassault Aviation's plant in Argenteuil, France, uses a number of short-run manufacturing cycles to produce small quantities of numerous aircraft structural parts. The many manual finishing operations, components, and manufacturing processes involved place a premium on management flexibility and quick reactions for meeting ever-changing production demands. Human operators, therefore, must assume a pivotal role in the workshop's decision making processes. This case study reports on our efforts to converge a top-down approach to functional design and a bottom-up approach to cognitive design of human-computer interactions to increase efficiency at the workshop. The functional design effort relies on a constraint reasoning process to provide a set of decision-making solutions, while the cognitive design effort comprises a knowledge acquisition phase. We combined these concepts to produce a highly interactive mock-up system, programmed with a constraint logic programming language, that lets users easily modify previous choices.