A common way of dynamically scheduling jobs in a flexible
manufacturing system (FMS) is by means of dispatching rules.
The problem of this method is that the performance of these
rules depends on the state the system is in at each moment,
and no single rule exists that is better than the rest in all
the possible states that the system may be in. It would therefore
be interesting to use the most appropriate dispatching rule
at each moment. To achieve this goal, a scheduling approach
which uses machine learning can be used. Analyzing the previous
performance of the system (training examples) by means of this
technique, knowledge is obtained that can be used to decide
which is the most appropriate dispatching rule at each moment
in time. In this paper, a review of the main machine learning-based
scheduling approaches described in the literature is presented.