Greybox scheduling: designing a joint cognitive system for sustainable manufacturing

The aims of this work were to investigate how decision making in production planning happens, to understand how energy efficiency could be included as a manufacturing goal and to design a decision support system that integrates into current work practices. This case study describes the research, design and development this system. An interactive visualisation provides an interface to a flexible optimisation engine and allows experts to interpret, amend and augment system inputs and outputs without the need for programming knowledge. This approach supports collaboration between automated and human agents, working as a joint cognitive system.