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Precast concrete manufacturers are highly involved in the construction industry through the supply of make-to-order products. Their workload is a complex combination of different and unique designed products, which have various delivery dates. The production process from design to manufacturing is complicated and contains uncertainties due to many factors such as: multi-disciplinary design, progress on the construction site, and costly purpose-built moulds. An integrated, comprehensive planning system dubbed the `Artificial Intelligence Planner' (AIP) has been proposed to improve the efficiency of the production planning processes. AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques are implemented in the AIP system to enhance data analyses and decision support for the production planning process. A case study for the trial implementation was conducted on a real make-to-order precast concrete manufacturer. The study concluded that the AIP system resulted in better production plans, compared to actual plans, with respect to customer lead-time, optimum factory's resource utilization, and in-house repository of production knowledge.
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Benjaoran et al. (2005) studied this question.