Facilities management: optimisation of maintenance schedules

Abstract

This is the formal document for the project conducted to optimise maintenance schedules for ABC. ABC is a facilities management company that o ers total integrated facilities management to its clients. ABC's objective is to enable its clients to concentrate on their core business, which is the business they do best. Fourier was requested by ABC to assist in the optimisation of the master maintenance plans and schedules that are currently used. Maintenance schedules can be optimised by reducing the traveling time to the sites and the number of trips made to each site. The aim of the project is to develop a scheduling technique that can assist ABC to schedule tasks in such a manner that multiple trips to the same site and traveling time are minimized. A literature review was conducted to nd ways in which the aforementioned aim can be achieved. After conducting the research it was decided that the model used for the MTMCPTD should be modi ed to address ABC's problem. It was also decided that a tabu search heuristic embedded in an adaptive memory program should be employed to solve the problem since the problem is NP-hard. The tabu search heuristic was formulated using Octave and an instance of the problem was solved to demonstrate the e ectiveness of the algorithm. The solution attained bore witness of the fact that improvements can be made to the original schedules by using the formulated algorithm. The improvements made are in terms of reduced traveling time and increased value added time.