Evolutionary algorithm for scheduling production jobs and preventive maintenance activities

Abstract

We propose in this article an evolutionary algorithm for the problem of scheduling N production jobs on M parallel machines. Each machine should be blocked once during the planning horizon for reasons of preventive maintenance. In our study, the maintenance tasks should continuously be performed because the maintenance resources are not sufficient. We aim to find a schedule composed of the production jobs and the maintenance tasks with a minimal preventive maintenance cost and total sum of production job's weighted completion times. Computational experiments are performed on randomly generated instances. The results show that the evolutionary algorithm is able to produce appropriate solutions for the problem. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.