Integrated production scheduling and maintenance policy for robustness in a single machine

This paper addresses the problem of finding robust production and maintenance schedules for a single machine with failure uncertainty. Both production and maintenance activities occupy the machine's capacity, while production depletes the machine's reliability and maintenance restores its reliability. Thus, we propose a proactive joint model which simultaneously determines the production scheduling and maintenance policy to optimize the robustness of schedules. Then, a three-Phase heuristic algorithm is devised to solve the mathematic model. Computational results indicate that the performance of solution can be significantly improved using our algorithm compared with the solutions by the traditional way. Furthermore, the balance of quality robustness and solution robustness and the impact of jobs' due dates are explored in detail. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.