Bus maintenance scheduling using multi-agent systems

Real-world scheduling problems are usually complex and involve many approaches to find sub-optimal rather than optimal solutions using reasonable computing resources. The bus maintenance scheduling problem, which is distributed and dynamic in nature, has received less attention compared to scheduling problems in manufacturing. The characteristics of bus maintenance scheduling problems are first identified, then a multi-agent system (MAS) is proposed to heuristically solve the bus 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. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.