Creating an expert system for detailed scheduling

This paper presents our experience in the development of an expert system to be used for detailed scheduling in an industrial company. This was a middle‐sized company which builds metallic components for the automotive industry. Because of the complexity of the environment where it has to work, with many interactions between related functions in the company, the development of this system has required a great deal of collaboration among different experts. So, we had to develop a more sophisticated methodology for this development. The conclusions extracted from this work lead us to a generalization of the methodology employed, which is also presented here.