A KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEM FOR OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT IN A SMALL TO MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISE

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the mechanis ms and structure of scheduling in a computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) environment. This has led to the development of new scheduling m odels, such as Petri nets, time-augmented Petri nets, fuzzy scheduling models and neural net scheduling models. A fundamental objective of a ny scheduling system is event synchronisation and optimisation of comm and, communication and control C-3 between each active node of the ove rall CIM structure. CIM scheduling can be regarded as a nonlinear dyna mic control process, whereby, the feed forward or feedback elements ar e the scheduling priorities that enable the manufacturing organisation to remain within a ''steady-state'' profit margin. However, in each d ifferent hierarchy level of the organisation, randomness phenomena in the C-3 environment can be observed, i.e. events in a particular depar tment or organisational level cause a perturbation elsewhere in the ma nufacturing organisation. Furthermore, these changes are constrained b y the framework of rules pre-set by the organisational structure and b usiness corporate strategy. To a first approximation, these cause-and- effect phenomena can be viewed as deterministic changes which may resu lt in ''deterministic chaos''. In this paper, a self-organising compen sating information system (SOCIS) is presented. This system is designe d utilising knowledge control modelling (KCM) topology with its archit ecture based on the principles of client-server and. a second-order pr oportional-integral-differential knowledge-based management system (PI D-KBMS).