A Heuristic Algorithm for Solving Single Machine Scheduling Problem with Periodic Maintenance

In this paper, the scheduling problem with nonresumable jobs and maintenance process is considered in order to minimize the makespan under two alternative strategies. The first strategy is to implement the maintenance process on the machine after a predetermined time period and the second one is to consider the maximum number of jobs that can be done with a special tool. We have proposed a new mathematical formulation for the aforementioned problem and as the problem is included in the NP-Hard class of problems, in the second part of the paper, we have proposed a heuristic algorithm in order to solve the problem in a reasonable time. Also, we have compared the performance of the proposed algorithm with existing methods in the literature. Computational results showed that the proposed algorithm is able to attain optimum solutions in most cases and also corroborate its better performance than the existing heuristic methods in the literature.