Artificial Intelligence in Production Scheduling Software

Let’s say you have a few production lines making individual items as part of an overall finished product. Your schedule ends up being all over the place. There are multiple processes, multiple people and multiple machine lines all feeding into the same areas where the finished product is assembled, tested and shipped. Looking at the schedule you’ve set up, either as part of a spreadsheet, a ‘manual’ system of pencil and paper (and lots of eraser marks) or even sticky notes on a painted piece of plywood, you really wonder how any kind of scheduling software could make any sense of what you do.

Production scheduling software can be smarter than you think.

Building artificial intelligence into a production scheduling system is a rather intelligent thing to do. It doesn’t matter how many production lines you have or how many other lines they feed into. The artificial intelligence already takes that into consideration. The intelligence looks at the current schedule and anything that needs to be added to it or deleted from it. It then starts mutating the schedule using a genetic algorithm, looking for the best possible solution for the current batch of jobs for the given lines. Once it finds the optimal solution, the artificial intelligence hands it back to you.

The production schedule it comes up with will likely be a bit different than what you might have done, so you may not recognize it. But the fact is, the schedule is there and, more importantly, it works.

Manual production scheduling systems are all well and good, and are certainly not something to be ignored. But if you want it done right, you’d better call in some artificial intelligence.