A Dynamic Genetic Algorithm for Solving a Single Machine Scheduling Problem with Periodic Maintenance

Abstract

The scheduling problem with nonresumable jobs and maintenance process is considered in order to minimize the makespan under two alternative strategies. The first strategy is to implement the maintenance process on the machine after a predetermined time period and the second one is to consider the maximum number of jobs that can be done with an especial tool. We propose a new mathematical formulation for the aforementioned problem which is included in the NP-Hard class of problems; in the second part of the paper, we propose a dynamic genetic algorithm so that the large- and medium-scale problems could be solvable in computationally reasonable time. Also we compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with existing methods in the literature. Experimental results showed that the proposed genetic algorithm is able to attain optimum solutions in most cases and also corroborate its better performance from the existing heuristic methods in the literature.