DEVELOPMENT OF MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS BASED INTELLIGENT FLEET MAINTENANCE SCHEDULING

Abstract

The fleet maintenance scheduling problem, which is distributed and dynamic in nature, has received less attention compared to scheduling problems in manufacturing.The characteristics of fleet maintenance scheduling problems are first identified, and then a multi-agent system (MAS) is proposed to heuristically solve the fleet maintenance scheduling problem investigated here.The methods for which the model caters for distributed and dynamic problem solving are then discussed.The model is then tested and generates solutions with equal optimality to reported studies and requires less computing time without constraint violation, and is comparable to the work of a mathematical programming approach.Finally, the advantages of MASs are presented and further studies are identified.