Performance study of multi-agent scheduling and coordination framework for maintenance networks

Real world maintenance networks often involve multi-organizational scheduling. The traditional centralized methods are not appropriate for solving the maintenance-scheduling problem because of the existence of private information and decision-making authorities at different organizations. Multi-agent scheduling and coordination is able to protect the private information and retain the decision-making authorities at different organizations. However, it presents its own challenges, such as obtaining a high-quality solution in a timely manner, providing the organizations with guidance on operating economically, being able to solve large-scale problems, and so on. In this paper, a price-based multi-agent scheduling and coordination framework is explored and a systematic study is carried out to evaluate the effects of factors on its performance. The empirical results not only show that the framework is able to quickly find high quality solutions for large-scale problems, but also reflect interesting relationships between selected factors such as resource utilization and performance measures such as mean asset turn-around-time.