Production/maintenance cooperative scheduling using multi-agents and fuzzy logic

Production/maintenance cooperative scheduling using multi-agents and fuzzy logic. OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. Within companies, production is directly concerned with the manufacturing schedule , but other services like sales, maintenance, purchasing or workforce management should also have an in¯uence on this schedule. These services often have together a hierarchical relationship, i.e. the leading function (most of the time sales or production) generates constraints de®ning the framework within which the other functions have to satisfy their own objectives. We show how the multi-agent paradigm, often used in scheduling for its ability to distribute decision-making, can also provide a framework for making several functions cooperate in the schedule performance. Production and maintenance have been chosen as an example: having common resources (the machines), their activities are actually often con¯icting. We show how to use a fuzzy logic in order to model the temporal degrees of freedom of the two functions, and show that this approach may allow one to obtain a schedule that provides a better compromise between the satisfaction of the respective objectives of the two functions.