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Carl Zeiss Jena GmbH

Work Schedule Generator

The task:
Previously it took a technician between half a day and a day to create a work schedule. It was not easy to adjust such a work schedule to changed circumstances.
Required was some software to create work schedules. Software that allows ad-hoc changes, suggests alternatives and enables a technician to interfere with the process and thus make current decisions.

The solution:
In the first phase a prototype was used to set up and test all necessary rules, the procedure and the interfaces to existing applications for a work schedule.
This way a non-trivial work schedule could first be generated fully-automatically. This result was the further basis for the cooperative development between developer (knowledge engineer) and the (technology) experts.
After that the knowledge was added via alternatives, affecting measures, exceptional cases, etc., step by step. Possibilities for the user to interfere were defined in the necessary places. An explanation component creates a possibility to "test and try" (search for the best solution).
In the second project phase time data was taken over. Due to that all cost determinations are exactly possible. Apart from that, they are the basis for compensation in production. The result is a complete work schedule.

The benefit:
The project initiated an intense technology discussion that significantly tightened or cleaned the technology. This caused drastic process acceleration and very flexible reacting to changes.
Maintaining the rule base of the system requires a part of the work schedulers' freed up work time. The remaining time became available for evaluating to introduce new technologies, materials and machines.

Permanent knowledge maintenance
The TPV application has been in use at Zeiss since 1993. The knowledge base now comprises app. 2000 complex rules and has been completely renewed once by the use of new technologies, machines and products. Zeiss was supported by ORISA in extending and structuring the technological domain knowledge, building a knowledge base, developing a knowledge-based plan generator and maintaining the knowledge base and the application.

Connecting with the ERP system
The construction data are imported from a joint optics data room. For product control the work schedules are passed on to SAP. The material and document basic data is automatically created and classified in SAP. There is an import interface for workstation data.