The development of a human–computer interactive scheduling system

A human-computer interactive scheduling system is developed with an automatic scheduling function. This function is designed based on the schedulers' experiences which have been collected in a previous study. By conducting an experiment, the total setup time and scheduling time of the subjects with the automatic scheduling function and without this function are compared. The result reveals that the total setup time and scheduling time of each circumstance are significantly reduced using the automatic scheduling function, especially in more complicated circumstances. In addition, the hypotheses tests of variances in setup time and scheduling time reveal that the automatic scheduling function could balance the scheduling skills of human schedulers. Moreover, a brief discussion of total setup time between four common dispatching rules and experimental data is presented. For further study, instead of developing the entirely automatic scheduling system, we might develop a system which can properly balance the work of the computer and the human by providing the assisting functions or information. However, we can still combine the advantages of simulation-based methods and AI methods to the human–computer interactive scheduling system to make the scheduling more efficient.