Working with an intelligent assistant: experiments with a symbiotic DSS for production planning and scheduling

An intelligent assistant (LA) has been built to provide assistance to production schedulers doing production planning and scheduling in a steel mill. This system is designed as a symbiotic DSS (S/DSS), in which the core analysis tool is a commercially-developed production planning and scheduling system using a variety of heuristics and optimization routines. The IA observes the user's use of the scheduling system and makes inferences about the user's use. Using these inferences and the results of its own explorations utilizing a second copy of the scheduling system, the S/DSS provides advice to the user. The intelligent assistant is operational. Results of initial experiments with the system are described.<>