Abstract
Engineering asset management (EAM) process is a broad discipline and the EAM functions and processes are characterized by its distributed nature. However, engineering asset nowadays mostly relies on self-maintained experiential rule-bases and periodic maintenance, which is lacking a collaborative engineering approach. To enrich the maintenance efficiency and customer relationship, this research proposes collaborative environment integrated by service center with good diagnosis and prognosis expertise. The collaborative maintenance chain jointly combines asset operation sites (i.e., maintenance demanders), service center (i.e., maintenance coordinator), system provider, first tier collaborators (i.e., maintenance providers), and maintenance part suppliers. Meanwhile, to realize the automation of communication and negotiation among organizations, multi-agent system (MAS) technique is applied. With agent-based collaborative environment, the entire service level of engineering asset maintenance chain is increased. Moreover, during the MAS design processes, this research combines Prometheus MAS modeling methodology with Petri-net modeling methodology and unified modeling language (UML) to visualize and rationalize the design processes of MAS. The major contributions of this research contain developing a Petri-net enabled Prometheus multi-agent system (MAS) modeling methodology and construct an agent-based maintenance chain framework for integrated engineering asset management.