Location-aware workflow scheduling in supply chains based on multi-agent systems

Abstract

In construction industry, companies form a supply chain to respond to business opportunities. The complex workflows, dependency between partners and their location pose a big challenge in construction project management. How to schedule activities to meet the construction project requirements under resource constraints is an important issue. To create a feasible schedule for a construction project, companies in a typical construction supply chain need to negotiate with each other. Development of an effective software system to support negotiation and collaboration between the partners in a construction supply chain is urgent. Execution of workflows in a construction project usually depends on location. Although workflow management problems have been extensively studied for decades, location information of workflows is rarely taken into account in existing literature. In this paper, we will study the development of a location-aware workflow scheduling system for construction supply chains. We will propose a flexible scheduling system to optimize the construction project schedule based on collaboration of entities/partners in a construction supply chain. 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 architecture to implement a location-aware multi-agent scheduling system based on JADE and Google API. The proposed methodology is verified by an example.