Scheduling of production and maintenance activities using multi-agent systems

Manufacturing systems are usually confronted to conflicting situations between production and maintenance services since their activities are considered as source of disturbance to each other. In order to reduce these conflicts, a multi-agent system SCEMP (Supervisor, Customer, Environment, Maintainer and Producer) is proposed in this paper, making sure that these two entities collaborate in order to achieve a common goal. It consists of scheduling the production activities according to the health states of the machines. The main idea is to use the prediction of the durations of use and remaining useful lifetimes of the machines devices, which can be obtained using prognostic techniques. This enables simultaneous scheduling of production and maintenance activities.