Project Scheduling Based on Multi-Agent Systems

One of the most important and challenging issues in construction project management is to schedule activities to meet the construction project requirements under resource constraints. In this paper, we will concentrate on the development of a workflow scheduling system that can be applied in construction supply chains based on the interactions of entities/partners. Execution of workflows that handle physical parts in a construction project may depend on location. Although workflow management problems have been extensively studied for decades, location information of workflows has not been considered in existing literature. We propose a methodology that includes modeling of location-aware workflows in construction projects based on formal workflow models and develop a technique to transform workflow models to formulate and solve a project scheduling problem. We propose a framework to implement a prototype system based on a FIPA-compliant multi-agent system platform and Google API.