Flow shop Scheduling Problem with Maintenance Coordination: a New Approach

This study investigates the coordination of production scheduling and maintenance planning in the flow shop scheduling environment. The problem is considered in a bi-objective form, minimizing the makespan as the production scheduling criterion and minimizing the system unavailability as the maintenance planning criterion. The time interval between consecutive maintenance activities as well as the number of maintenance activities on each machine are assumed to be non-fixed. A mixed integer programming formulation of the problem is presented. A special case of the problem, named as single server maintenance is also studied. Then, a bi-objective ant colony system algorithm is presented to solve the problem in focus. To obtain the appropriate components of the proposed algorithm, two sets of experiments are provided. Firstly, experiments are carried out to select the suitable heuristic method to build the heuristic information part of the algorithm between CDS and NEH. Secondly, experiments are reported to select the local search algorithm between iterated local search and adjacent pair-wise interchange. At last, experiments are generated to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, comparing it to the results of an exhaustive search algorithm.