A Multi-Agent System For A Bus Crew Rescheduling System
Unpredictable events (UE) are major factors that cause disruption to everyday bus operation. In the occurrence of UE, the main resources - crews and vehicles - are affected, and this leads to crew schedule disruption. One way to deal with the problem is crew rescheduling. Most of the current appr...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2008
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/13459/1/A_Multi-Agent_System_For_A_Bus_Crew_Rescheduling_System.pdf http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/13459/ |
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| Institution: | Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | Unpredictable events (UE) are major factors that cause disruption to everyday bus operation. In
the occurrence of UE, the main resources - crews and vehicles - are affected, and this leads to
crew schedule disruption. One way to deal with the problem is crew rescheduling. Most of the
current approaches are based on static schedules do not support rescheduling in a real-time
scenario. They have the ability to reschedule but a new complete schedule is produced without
concerning the real time situation. The mathematical approaches which are used by most
scheduling packages have the ability to search for optimum or near optimum schedules but they
are usually slow to produce results in real-time because they are computationally intensive when
faced with complex situations. In practice, crew or bus rescheduling is managed manually, based
on the supervisor's capabilities and experience in managing UE. However, manual rescheduling
is complex, prone to error and not optimum, especially when dealing with many UE at the same
time.
This research proposes the CRSMAS (Crew Rescheduling System with Multi Agent System)
approach as an alternative that may help supervisors to make quick rescheduling decisions by
automating the crew rescheduling process. A Multi Agent System (MAS) is considered suitable
to support this rescheduling because agents can dynamically adapt their behaviour to changing
environments and they can find solutions quic~ly via negotiations and cooperation between them.
To evaluate the CRSMAS, two types of experiment are carried out: Single Event and Multiple
Events. The Single Event experiment is used to find characteristics of crew schedules that
influence the crew rescheduling process while the Multiple Events experiment is used to test the
capability of CRSMAS in dealing with numerous events that occur randomly. A wide range of
simulation results, based on real-world data, are reported and analysed. Based on the experiment
it is concluded that CRSMAS is suitable for automating the crew rescheduling process and
capable of quick rescheduling whether facing single events or multiple events at the same time,
the success of rescheduling is not on ly dependant on the tool but also to other factors such as the
characteristics of crew schedules and the period of the UE, and one limitation of CRSMAS that
was discovered is it cannot simulate different type of events at the same time. This limitation is
because in different events there are different rules but, in Virtual World, agents can only
negotiate with one set of rules at a time. |
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