An effective predictive heuristic for robust and stable scheduling with machine maintenance

This paper takes a predictive scheduling approach to find a robust and stable schedule for single machine scheduling problem under uncertainty. Machine is subject to random breakdown follow the weibull probability distribution. Interval Maintenance activities are considered additionally to propose practical and effective heuristic. The expected total completion times and the expected sum of absolute deviation between the planned and realized job completion times are considered as the robustness stability measures respectively. Computational results show that the proposed algorithm provides better robustness and stability than the other method taken from literature. Moreover, Extensive computational experiments of over 900 combinations of problems and breakdown characteristics show the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic especially in a system subject to wear-out with moderately increasing hazard rate