Article ID: | iaor20033134 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 30 |
Issue: | 6 |
Start Page Number: | 821 |
End Page Number: | 832 |
Publication Date: | May 2003 |
Journal: | Computers and Operations Research |
Authors: | Feng Shan, Li Ling, Cen Ling, Huang Jingping |
Keywords: | production, neural networks |
This paper investigates the application of artificial neural networks to the problem of job shop scheduling with a scope of a deterministic time-varying demand pattern over a fixed planning horizon. The purpose of the research is to design and develop a job shop scheduling system (a scheduling software) that can generate effective job shop schedules using the multi-layered perceptron (MLP) networks. The contributions of this study include designing, developing, and implementing a production activity scheduling system using the MLP networks; developing a method for organizing sample data using a denotation bit to indicate processing sequence and processing time of a job simultaneously; using the back-propagation training process to control local minimal solutions; and developing a heuristics to improve and revise the initial production schedule. The proposed production activity schedule system is tested in a real production environment and illustrated in the paper with a sample case.