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Micro-Opportunistic Scheduling (Micro-Boss) This project is no longer active. Head: Norman Sadeh-Koniecpol Mailing address: Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Associated center: CIMDS Associated lab/group: Intelligent Coordination and Logistics Laboratory For more information, see this project's homepage.

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Project Description

Micro-opportunistic scheduling generalizes bottleneck scheduling approaches, which attempt to build high quality schedules by first optimizing the schedule of bottleneck resources. Rather than assuming the presence of one or more global, static bottlenecks spanning the entire scheduling horizon, as in traditional bottleneck scheduling approaches, micro-opportunistic scheduling continuously monitors resource contention during the construction or revision of schedules and dynamically redirects its optimization effort towards the "micro-bottleneck" (a finer type of bottleneck) that is currently the most critical. The result is a highly efficient approach to scheduling that consistently generates solutions of particularly high quality. This new approach to schedule generation and revision has been developed and refined over the years in the context of a system called Micro-Boss.

Micro-Boss has been customized for the scheduling of the Printed Wiring Assembly area at Raytheon's Andover manufacturing facility, where it was shown to improve due date performance by more than 50 percent, reduce leadtimes by 55 to 60 percent and inventory by 20 to 30 percent depending on load conditions. The system has also been customized for a blending and packaging environment (work with Mitsubishi) and was deployed in the summer of 1997 in a large and highly dynamic Raytheon machine shop with over 150 work centers and as many staff (one of the largest such shops on the East Coast). Raytheon has indicated its intention to deploy the system at three additional sites.

Past members

	Name	Title	Email Address
	David Hildum	Project Scientist	hildum@cs.cmu.edu
	Dag Kjenstad	Visiting Research Scholar
	Norman Sadeh-Koniecpol	Associate Professor, ISRI	sadeh@cs.cmu.edu
	Allen Tseng	Research Programmer

Publications

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Micro-Boss: Dual-Use ARPI Scheduling Technology Helps Improve Manufacturing Performance
  N. Sadeh-Koniecpol
  IEEE Expert, February, 1995.
  Download: pdf [14 KB], ps.gz [157 KB] copyrighted

• Micro-Opportunistic Scheduling: The Micro-Boss Factory Scheduler
  N. Sadeh-Koniecpol
  tech. report CMU-RI-TR-94-04, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, March, 1994. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [1643 KB] copyrighted

• Micro-Boss: Towards a New Generation of Manufacturing Scheduling Shells
  N. Sadeh-Koniecpol
  Proceedings of the ARPA/Rome Laboratory Knowledge-Based Planning and Scheduling Initiative, February, 1994, pp. 191-203.

• Micro-Boss: A Micro-opportunistic Factory Scheduler
  N. Sadeh-Koniecpol
  Expert Systems with Applications month: July--September, Vol. 6, No. 3 month: July--September, July, 1993, pp. 377-392.

• Micro- vs. Macro-opportunistic Scheduling
  N. Sadeh-Koniecpol and M.S. Fox
  Computer Applications in Production and Engineering: Integration Aspects, Doumeingts, G., Browne, J., and Tomljanovich, M., ed., Elsevier Science Publishers, Holland, 1991, pp. 651 - 658.
  Download: pdf [566 KB] copyrighted