Building maintenance scheduling using cost-based reasoning and constraint programming techniques

Efficient scheduling of maintenance tasks in business or residential buildings is of significant importance on operation of buildings. Inadequate maintenance schedules could have serious consequences, including productivity losses due to failures of building components, safety hazards that might cost lives, or inefficient energy use. Other important considerations include running costs and dissatisfied occupants. Consequently, optimised maintenance scheduling is becoming a crucial requirement for building sustainability and reduction of operating costs. This paper presents a constraint based building maintenance scheduling tool that produces optimised weekly maintenance schedules taking into consideration a variety of constraints and multiple objectives. Additionally, we introduce our heuristic ModReg that uses cost reasoning to guide the search process towards an optimal schedule. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our ModReg heuristic clearly outperforms the Dom/Wdeg heuristic and enables our maintenance scheduling tool to provide optimal schedules for large problem instances in a short period of time.