Maintenance workflow management in hospitals: An automated multi-agent facility management system

The complex, uncertain, and dynamic nature of the maintenance management environment is a source of concern to facility managers in hospitals due to the unexpected failure of building components, daily arrival of maintenance orders, and changes in schedule. In such circumstances, centralized systems become far-fetched because of their top-down approach which lacks a feedback mechanism and ignores new information. Therefore, to address any change, centralized systems have to be reformulated making it impractical, short-sighted, and problematic to adopt them in hospitals. As such, the use of centralized systems can lead to financial loss and dissatisfaction of patients. It, therefore, becomes necessary to establish a distributed maintenance management system to support the facility managers’ making-decision process. Multi-agent facility management system (MAFMS) was conceptually designed. This design employed Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams that illustrate the specific agents of the system and how these agents interact with each other. Maintenance data of a hospital building was used to initiate the multi-agent simulation for workflow management. The simulation results show the benefits of the proposed system, to reduce the response time to maintenance requests compared to the current maintenance system. •Maintenance delays are primarily due to inefficient allocation of required resources and unstructured workflow process.•Developed MAFMS solves the complex problems of workflow management and resource allocation.•MAFMS is a distributed system, which improves communication among the allocated resources.•MAS simulation results show that implementing MAFMS can improve the resource response time to requested maintenance orders.