An effective heuristic for flexible job-shop scheduling problem with maintenance activities

Most production scheduling problems, including the standard flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP), assume that machines are continuously available. However, in most realistic situations, machines may become unavailable during certain periods due to preventive maintenance (PM). In this paper, a flexible job-shop scheduling problem with machine availability constraints is considered. Each machine is subject to preventive maintenance during the planning period and the starting times of maintenance activities are either flexible in a time window or fixed beforehand. Moreover, two cases of maintenance resource constraint are considered: sufficient maintenance resource available or only one maintenance resource available. To deal with this variant FJSP problem with maintenance activities, a filtered beam search (FBS) based heuristic algorithm is proposed. With a modified branching scheme, the machine availability constraint and maintenance resource constraint can be easily incorporated into the proposed algorithm. Simulation experiments are conducted on some representative problems. The results demonstrate that the proposed filtered beam search based heuristic algorithm is a viable and effective approach for the FJSP with maintenance activities. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.