The long use of a system causes its degradation. Hence, the maintenance activity is required in order to keep and improve the efficiency in the system. With the rapid development in networking technology, a need appears to change the manufacturing strategies. These new technologies improve the maintenance process, and establish remote maintenance (tele-maintenance, e-maintenance and m-maintenance). These kinds of maintenance try to provide personnel maintenance with the right information at the suitable time, which makes information available, anywhere and anytime. Our proposition is the use of mobile agent technology to reduce the maintenance costs and solve the problem of the unavailability of an expert in all phases of condition-based maintenance (CBM) strategy. The mobile agent technology overcomes a lot of problems and there is not much work that has used this technology. We have also used the web services (WS) to insure interoperability between machines and to support interaction over the network. Our approach gives great support to the maintenance engineer as it facilitates the access to decision-making support, work order, etc. which are available in the device like smartphone. This paper presents the development of a mobile maintenance support system based on mobile agent technology. The proposed system, the web and agent technology as well as remote communication were tested successfully.
The single machine scheduling problem has been often regarded as a simplified representation that contains many polynomial solvable cases. However, in real-world applications, the imprecision of data at the level of each job can be critical for the implementation of scheduling strategies. Therefore, the single machine scheduling problem with the weighted discounted sum of completion times is treated in this paper, where we assume that the processing times, weighting coefficients and discount factor are all described using trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. Our aim in this study is to elaborate adequate measures in the context of possibility theory for the assessment of the optimality of a fixed schedule. Two optimization approaches namely genetic algorithm and pattern search are proposed as computational tools for the validation of the obtained properties and results. The proposed approaches are experimented on the benchmark problem instances and a sensitivity analysis with respect to some configuration parameters is conducted. Modeling and resolution frameworks considered in this research offer promise to deal with optimality in the wide class of fuzzy scheduling problems, which is recognized to be a difficult task by both researchers and practitioners.