Fuzzy logic control of aggregate production planning

Rinks used linguistic variables of the sort proposed by Zadeh for cost, inventory, production, and work force. He operated on these with fuzzy if-ten rules in a manner like that used by Mamdani and Assilan to control a steam engine. The Rinks membership functions and rules were subjective creations. Nevertheless, he obtained results that compared favorably to both prior and subsequent heuristic treatments of the HMMS data. We have developed a C language fuzzy logic controller (FLC) that uses the Rinks discrete membership functions and closely reproduces his results. We have used this FLC to investigate the effect of granularity of the discretization on the quality of solution. We have also used Wang-Mendel learning to improve the rule base. This paper discusses these results and suggests areas for further investigation.