Patent Document ID: 5432887
Application ID: 08031954
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A computer neural network scheduling system adapted for scheduling of a manufacturing resource on a factory floor, the scheduling process producing a schedule for a list of work orders given the manufacturing resource having at least one machine, the scheduling system comprising: a sequencer, for sorting said list of work orders in a sequence for scheduling in accordance with a work orders priority index;. a scheduling engine, for producing a schedule for a sequence of work orders in accordance with said sorted list of work orders and capacity of said manufacturing resource, comprising: a trained recurrent neural network, comprising a scheduling knowledge base, for predicting possible schedules for said sequence of work orders in accordance with said sorted list of work orders and said capacity of manufacturing resource and in accordance with weights; a competitive neural network, responsive to said trained recurrent neural network, for producing a schedule in accordance with said sorted list of work orders; and a constraint relaxation module, responsive to said competitive neural network, for relaxing constraints in the event of an unsuccessful assignment of a work order; and knowledge processor, comprising: an encoder, responsive to said sequencer, for encoding said sorted list of work orders and capacity of said manufacturing resource to a neural network format for input into said scheduling engine; and a decoder, responsive to said scheduling engine, for decoding said schedule from said scheduling engine into a format suitable for storage into a database.