The central purpose of this book is to acquaint the reader especially
with the cases of local search based learning as well as to introduce
methods of constraint based reasoning, both with respect to their use in
automated manufacturing. We restrict our attention to job shop
scheduling as well as to one-machine scheduling with sequence dependent
setup times. Additionally some design and planning issues in flexible
manufacturing systems are considered. General purpose search methods
which in particular include methods from local search such as simulated
annealing, tabu search, and genetic algorithms, are the basic
ingredients of the proposed intelligent knowledge-based scheduling
systems, enriched by a number of constraint-based local decision rules
in order to introduce problem specific knowledge.