Process for joint scheduling based on health assessment of technical resources

Production and maintenance services are usually in conflict since their activities are performed on the same resources, their operations are often considered as sources of disturbance to each other. The objective of this paper is to describe a process enabling to schedule simultaneously the production activities and maintenance operations. The proposed process is based on a multi-agents system that has shown its effectiveness in dealing with conflict situations. It consists in scheduling the production activities on the resources taking into consideration their health states. Thus, instead of waiting for the resource to fail or of planning in advance preventive maintenances where some would be unneeded, the health assesment functions provide information about the reliability of the production technical resources. Among this information, degradation measurements permit the prediction of the remaining durations of use also known as remaining useful lifetimes. Thus they enable prior planning for maintenance orders and scheduling the production activities, so that conflicts can be managed between maintenance and planning activities.