Scheduling sequence-dependent setup time job shops with preventive maintenance

Although many researchers have proposed different techniques to integrate production scheduling and preventive maintenance, these techniques have some drawbacks. For example, some of them are so intricate that one cannot easily implement them, or some strongly exploit specific features of the original studied problem that one cannot apply them to other problems. We hereby propose two techniques that are easy to understand and code, yet simplistically adaptable to any other machine-scheduling problems. This paper investigates job shop scheduling with sequence-dependent setup times and preventive maintenance policies. The optimization criterion is to minimize makespan. Four metaheuristics based on simulated annealing and genetic algorithms as well as adaptations of two metaheuristics in the literature are employed to solve the problem. The performances of the proposed algorithms are evaluated by comparing their solutions through two benchmarks based on Taillard’s instances.