Refinery scheduling attracts increasing concerns in both academic and industrial communities in recent years. However, due to the complexity of refinery processes, little has been reported for success use in real world refineries. In academic studies, refinery scheduling is usually treated as an integrated, large-scale optimization problem, though such complex optimization problems are extremely difficult to solve. In this paper, we proposed a way to exploit the prior knowledge existing in refineries, and developed a decision making system to guide the scheduling process. For a real world fuel oil oriented refinery, ten adjusting process scales are predetermined. A C4.5 decision tree works based on the finished oil demand plan to classify the corresponding category (i.e. adjusting scale). Then, a specific sub-scheduling problem with respect to the determined adjusting scale is solved. The proposed strategy is demonstrated with a scheduling case originated from a real world refinery. (c) 2017 The Chemical Industry and Engineering Society of China, and Chemical Industry Press. All rights reserved.