AI-Based Scheduling for Maintenance Shifts
Planning maintenance activities in large industrial environments is a complex and time-consuming process. As organizations move towards more unmanned operations and increasingly specialized maintenance campaigns, planners must coordinate thousands of work orders while balancing resource availability, operational constraints and production schedules.
Lighthouse developed an AI-powered scheduling solution built on SAP Business AI and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) that helps maintenance planners optimize work order scheduling, intelligently bundle related tasks and improve overall planning efficiency.
The Challenge
A leading company in the oil and gas industry wanted to modernize its maintenance planning process to support a new operating model with more focused maintenance shifts and increased use of unmanned facilities.
Traditional planning required significant manual effort, forcing planners to spend valuable time adjusting schedules, coordinating related work orders and resolving planning conflicts. As maintenance campaigns became more complex, creating an optimized schedule before execution became increasingly difficult.
The customer needed a solution that could assist planners with intelligent scheduling recommendations while preserving full control over the final maintenance plan.
Our Solution
Lighthouse developed a custom side-by-side application that extends the customer's scheduling environment with an AI-powered planning workbench.
The solution enables maintenance planners to evaluate and apply automatically generated rescheduling recommendations and intelligent work order bundling proposals through a user-friendly interface. Draft plans can be shared with other users for review and refinement before being published back into the existing scheduling system.
The scheduling engine leverages multiple intelligent agents to evaluate operational constraints including weather conditions, and other planning dependencies. By combining automated optimization with human decision-making, the solution improves planning accuracy, reduces manual scheduling effort, and supports more efficient maintenance execution.
Business Value
The AI-powered planning assistant significantly reduces manual scheduling effort while improving maintenance planning quality.
Key benefits include:
AI-assisted optimization of maintenance schedules
Intelligent work order bundling recommendations
Improved utilization of maintenance resources
Reduced planner workload and manual adjustments
Support for complex planning scenarios through multiple AI agents
Clean Core architecture ensuring long-term maintainability and scalability
For organizations where production shutdowns can result in substantial operational costs, even small improvements in planning quality can deliver significant business value. The solution enables planners to focus on strategic decision-making rather than manual schedule optimization.
Technologies
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP)
SAP Business AI
SAP Gen AI Hub
Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP)
Large Language Models (LLMs)
Multi-Agent AI Architecture
SAP Work Order Management
Do you want to know more?
Get in touch with Andreas Bauge to found out how we can solve your challenges.