A generic library of problem solving methods for scheduling applications

In this paper we propose a generic library of problem-solving methods for solving scheduling applications. Some attempts have been made in the past at developing a library of scheduling problem-solvers but in some cases these earlier proposals subscribe to a specific application domain of scheduling, which restricted their reusability, while in some other cases they subscribe to the specific problem-solving technique which may be applicable only to a subset of the space of scheduling problems. Finally all the existing scheduling libraries fail to provide an adequate degree of detail and precision. In our approach we subscribe to the Task-Method-Domain-Application knowledge modeling framework which provides a structured organization for the different components of the library. At the task level, we constructed a generic scheduling task ontology to formalize the space of scheduling problems. At the method level, we constructed a generic problem-solving model of scheduling that generalizes from the variety of approaches to scheduling problem-solving, which can be found in the literature. And, then seven knowledge-intensive methods are developed as a specialization of the generic problem-solving model of scheduling. Finally, we validated our library on a number of applications to demonstrate its generic nature and effective support for developing scheduling applications