The scheduling of maintenance service Original Research Article

We study a discrete problem of scheduling activities of several types under the constraint that at most a single activity can be scheduled to any one period. Applications of such a model are the scheduling of maintenance service to machines and multi-item replenishment of stock. In this paper we assume that the cost associated with any given type of activity increases linearly with the number of periods since the last execution of this type. The problem is to find an optimal schedule specifying at which periods to execute each of the activity types in order to minimize the long-run average cost per period.