The study of autonomous negotiation system based on auction enabled intelligent agent - Using parking tower asset maintenance as case example

Abstract

Satisfying customers' needs is one of the most critical points in the customer-oriented market space, especially for the service industry. Therefore, the issues consumers care most when using the automatic parking tower is that if it can provide efficient service at right time. In the traditional maintenance practice of automatic parking tower, the maintenance demanders (i.e., parking towers) and maintenance providers (i.e., system providers) have different viewpoints of maintenance actions, especially on the time for maintenance activities. For maintenance demanders, they would like to minimize the influence of maintenance jobs and maximize the profit from parking service provision. However, for the maintenance providers, they would like to minimize the cost spent on maintenance jobs, especially minimizing the overtime works. To provide solutions for this conflict for automatic parking tower industry, this research proposes an integrated maintenance chain. In the proposed maintenance chain, the maintenance demanders and maintenance providers are coordinated by the service center with expertise in diagnosis and prognosis to help transform the traditional maintenance price and time negotiation as a non-cooperative game into a cooperative game. Moreover, to increase the proposed maintenance chain efficiency, multi-agent system with auction authorities is introduced to realize all-day cooperation. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2009.