A heuristic approach for a scheduling problem with periodic maintenance and sequence-dependent setup times

In this paper we study a problem of sequencing jobs in a machine with programmed preventive maintenance and sequence-dependent setup times. To the authors’ knowledge, this problem has not been treated as such in the operations research literature. Computational experiments show that it is very hard to solve the problem by exact methods. Therefore, the contribution of this paper is to design and implement a solution approach based on metaheuristic procedures. The proposed method finds high quality solutions in very short computational times.