Scheduling under machine breakdown in a continuous process industry

In many continuous process industries, machine breakdowns may affect the planned activities, especially when maintaining high shop performance is desired. In this paper, we consider a practical problem encountered in a textile company where the machine breakdown occurs frequently. A heuristic is developed as the solution approach for the problem. The basic idea of the heuristic is to provide a longer setup time (or equivalently, a longer idle time) to reduce the breakdown rate. The performance of the heuristic is evaluated by comparing its solution with both the solutions of the current scheduling method and the branch-and-bound algorithm. The real data from the company are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristic.