Schedular++: scheduling with knowledge objects

The paper presents a scheduling system, Schedular++, which integrates logic rules into the object oriented paradigm. Schedular++ demonstrates the application of knowledge objects to solve a scheduling problem. Telecom manages the telephone network across the entire country. To efficiently manage the network, many fault dispatch centres (FDC) are distributed across the country, and each FDC maintains a team of field workers to fix faults in several of their service suburbs. One of the daily jobs in each FDC is to dispatch workers to fix network faults in each suburb. This includes daily downloading of defect reports from the customer service representatives' (CSR) database (CSR is the operator service where customers call for their telephone defects), and schedule workers for the next day. Consideration is given to building an object oriented system to schedule workers to faults in each FDC. Rules should be incorporated into this system to provide better constraints representation and inference ability to the system.