A study on proactive maintenance scheduling with distributed cooperative approach

In our study, we propose a distributed cooperative scheduling method and apply the method to maintenance scheduling problem in re-entrant production systems. Lagrangian decomposition and coordination method is one of the distributed cooperative scheduling methods, which has some individual schedulers and each scheduler needs only local information, then it is relatively easy to expand and modify for large production systems. The proposed approach regards maintenance as job within limits of starting and finishing time, so that the schedule can realize not only proper maintenance operations to prevent facility troubles but also high productivity. We show the effectiveness of the proposed concept in simulation experiments.