With the rapid progress of network technologies and sensors, monitoring the sensor data such as pressure, temperature, current, vibration and other electrical, mechanical and chemical variables has become much more significant. With the arrival of Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI), sophisticated solutions can be developed to prevent failures and predict the equipment’s remaining useful life (RUL). These techniques allow for taking maintenance actions with haste and precision. Accordingly, this study provides a systematic literature review (SLR) of the predictive maintenance (PdM) techniques in transportation systems. The main focus of this study is the literature covering PdM in the motor vehicles’ industry in the last 5 years. A total of 52 studies were included in the SLR and examined in detail within the scope of our research questions. We provided a summary on statistical, stochastic and AI approaches for PdM applications and their goals, methods, findings, challenges and opportunities. In addition, this study encourages future research by indicating the areas that have not yet been studied in the PdM literature.

In a production environment, scheduling decides job and machine allocations and the operation sequence. In a job shop production system, the wide variety of jobs, complex routes, and real-life events becomes challenging for scheduling activities. New, unexpected events disrupt the production schedule and require dynamic scheduling updates to the production schedule on an event-based basis. To solve the dynamic scheduling problem, we propose a multi-agent system with reinforcement learning aimed at the minimization of tardiness and flow time to improve the dynamic scheduling techniques. The performance of the proposed multi-agent system is compared with the first-in–first-out, shortest processing time, and earliest due date dispatching rules in terms of the minimization of tardy jobs, mean tardiness, maximum tardiness, mean earliness, maximum earliness, mean flow time, maximum flow time, work in process, and makespan. Five scenarios are generated with different arrival intervals of the jobs to the job shop production system. The results of the experiments, performed for the 3 × 3, 5 × 5, and 10 × 10 problem sizes, show that our multi-agent system overperforms compared to the dispatching rules as the workload of the job shop increases. Under a heavy workload, the proposed multi-agent system gives the best results for five performance criteria, which are the proportion of tardy jobs, mean tardiness, maximum tardiness, mean flow time, and maximum flow time.