Evaluation of the Robustness for Integrated Production Scheduling and Maintenance Planning Problem

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the surrogate measures of robustness for the integration of production scheduling and preventive maintenance planning problem with stochastic machine failures. First, the influence of two categories of maintenance on operation completion time is analyzed. Since it does not come with an exact solution, a novel measure algorithm for evaluating two types of robustness simultaneously is proposed, based on the internal relationships among the scheduling structure, the number and sequence of preventive maintenance activities, the probability and downtime of failures, and the expected completion time of operation. Extensive experiments are conducted on 19 benchmark problems with random machine breakdowns. Experimental results first show that the correlation between our algorithm and Monte Carlo simulation in two robustness indicators is above 99%, and the former computes much faster than the latter. A thorough comparison is made with the other three surrogate robustness measures, which further proves the accuracy of our algorithm. Additional experiments also confirm the benefits by integrating preventive maintenance.