Building ontologies for production scheduling systems: towards a unified methodology

In this paper we consider the use of ontologies as the basis for structuring and simplifying the process of constructing real-time problem-solving tools, focusing specifically on the task of production scheduling. In spite of the commonality in production scheduling system requirements and design, different scheduling environments invariably present different challenges (e.g. different constraints, different objectives, different domain structure, etc.). The proposed methodology for building ontologies used for production scheduling systems represents a synthesis of extensive work in developing constraint-based scheduling models for a wide range of applications in manufacturing and production planning. Since the effective modeling is one of the most important and difficult steps in the development of reliable information systems, and taking into consideration the fact that the general problem of the production scheduling in the industries is very difficult and still unsolved, one can easily estimate the merit of this methodology.