1 DYNAMIC SCHEDULING OF MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS WITH MACHINE LEARNING

A common way of scheduling jobs dynamically in a manufacturing system is by means of dispatching rules. The drawback of this method is that the performance of these rules depends on the state the system is in at each moment, and no one rule exists that overrules the rest in all the possible states that the system may be in. It would therefore be interesting to use the most appropriate rule at each moment. To achieve this goal, a scheduling approach which uses machine learning is presented in this paper. The methodology proposed in this paper may be divided into five basic steps. Firstly, definition of the appropriate control attributes for identifying the relevant manufacturing patterns. In second place, creation of a set of training examples using different values of the control attributes. Subsequently, acquiring of heuristic rules by means of a machine learning program. Then, using of the previously calculated heuristic rules to select the most appropriate dispatching rules, and finally testing of the performance of the approach. The approach that we propose is applied to a flow shop system and to a classic job shop configuration. The results demonstrate that this approach produces an improvement in the performance of the system when compared to the traditional method of using dispatching rules