Abstract
In this report, the features of expert operators' skills in steelworks are discussed. Most of the skills cannot be substituted with a computer system and we name such skills ‘field forces’. Therefore, it can be said that Japanese steelworks have been supported by the field force. In domestic manufacturing plants, there still remain lots of operations which need field forces, for instance, machine control, fault diagnosis, plant maintenance and production scheduling operations. Here, we take a scheduling operation for an example. By describing the expert operator's tangible abilities which cannot be captured with a conventional scheduling system, we consider the essence of field forces. The outline of this report is as follows. After showing a brief introduction in Chap. 1, an example of a scheduling problem in a steel making process is presented in Chap. 2. The problem is used to describe the difference of the constraints and evaluation function between a human expert and a computer scheduler. In Chap. 3, several specific capabilities of scheduling experts are illustrated. When they deal with a scheduling problem, they always consider various viewpoints such as chronological change of plants. Moreover, some experts are able to even convert the problem drastically when a serious plant trouble happens in an upper process. In Chap. 4, we discuss the necessary system requirements for scheduling software to attain the human expert capabilities shown above and finish this report with a conclusion in Chap. 5.
