A sequantial distributed approach for the joint scheduling of jobs and maintenance operations in the flowshop sequencing problem

Many works refer to the scheduling problem of both preventive maintenance and production activities. Few works concern the dynamic scheduling problem of these two activities. This aspect is mainly concerned by corrective maintenance activities (equipment failure). In this regard, we propose a distributed approach using multi-agent paradigm for scheduling independent jobs and maintenance operations in the flowshop sequencing problem. The proposed multi-agent system introduces a dialogue between two communities of agents (production and maintenance) based on a two-step sequential strategy: first scheduling the production jobs then inserting the preventive maintenance operations, taking the production schedule as a mandatory constraint, to generate a joint production and maintenance schedule. The objective is then to optimize a bi-objective function which takes into account both maintenance and production criterion. It also provides a framework in order to react to the disturbances occurring in the workshop. The main point is to show how the proposed multi-agent system provides a better compromise between the satisfactions of respective objectives of the two functions.