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From: minton@kronos.arc.nasa.gov (Steve Minton)
Subject: Re: NN for solving (job-shop) scheduling problems ?
Message-ID: <1994Nov17.195920.4647@ptolemy-ethernet.arc.nasa.gov>
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Date: Thu, 17 Nov 1994 19:59:20 GMT
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>>I am a graduate student seeking information about neural networks for
>>solving (job-shop) scheduling problems. I know some papers about this
>>theme and I am interested in further informations. Are there any
>>researchers working on this theme ?  I appreciate any help/comment

Minton S., Johnston, M.D., Philips, A.B., and Laird P. ``Minimizing
 Conflicts: A Heuristic Method for Constraint-Satisfaction and
 Scheduling Problems'' Artificial Intelligence, Volume 58, pages
 161-205, 1992. Reprinted in {\em Constraint-based Reasoning}, E.C.
 Freuder and A.K. Mackworth (Eds.), MIT Press, 1994.

This may not be exactly what you are looking for, but you might find
it interesting nevertheless.  We discuss a neural network model for
solving schedduling problems (proposed by Johnson and Adorf for
scheduling the Hubble Space Telescope).  An analysis of what the
network was doing allowed us to discover that "iterative repair" (a
form of local search) was a simpler and faster method for HST
scheduling (and other things, as exemplified by our results with
N-Queens). Our work has been picked up by a variety people and has led
to of other related techniques, such as Bell Laboratories' GSAT. The
network is no longer used, but it proved to be an important step along
the way.

Also see: 
 Johnston, M.D. and Minton, S. ``Analyzing a Heuristic Strategy
 for Constraint Satisfaction and Scheduling'' in {\em Intelligent
 Scheduling}, M. Zweben and M.S. Fox (Eds.), Morgan Kaufmann, 1994.

