Article ID: | iaor19981281 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 17 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 141 |
End Page Number: | 157 |
Publication Date: | May 1996 |
Journal: | Decision Support Systems |
Authors: | Mertens P., Belz R. |
Keywords: | simulation: applications, production |
Knowledge-based systems can help to enlarge the application range for simulation. Acting as intelligent front-ends they communicate with the user and provide statistical knowledge. As an example, the paper presents SIMULEX, a prototype decision support system for short-term rescheduling in manufacturing. SIMULEX couples expert systems and simulation to assist the production manager in handling production disturbances. Its core is a job shop simulator that models the plant and evaluates the results of various rescheduling measures. One intelligent front-end (the access system) gathers information about the disturbance and configures the simulation experiments. Another (the run time control) supervises the simulation runs. A third one (the termination/interpretation system) analyzes the data, derives conclusions and suggests the most promising measures. The paper focuses on the system's decision model that allows multi-attribute decisions under uncertainty.