SIMPSON: An intelligent assistant for short-term manufacturing scheduling

In this paper, we describe the process by which we modeled day-to-day scheduling decisions made at a manufacturing facility, and the way in which we incorporated what we learned into an intelligent decision support system. That system has been fielded, and is in daily use at the plant. The Short-term Intelligent Manufacturing Planning Support for Nuclear fuel tubes system (SIMPSON) is part of a larger effort, called MULTEX, which is still under development. MULTEX is intended to test whether or not a combined OR/AI approach to system design could provide more robust decision support than would either method individually.