Scheduling of jobs and maintenance in a textile company

In this paper we consider a periodic maintenance scheduling problem in a textile company. In our research, a periodic maintenance schedule consists of several maintenance periods and each maintenance period is scheduled after a periodic time interval. The purpose of this paper is to find a schedule that minimizes the maximum tardiness subject to periodic maintenance and nonresumable jobs. An efficient heuristic is developed to provide the near optimal schedule for the problem. A branch-and-bound algorithm is also proposed to find the optimal schedule. Some important theorems associated with the problem are implemented in the algorithm. Computational results show that the proposed heuristic is highly accurate and efficient.