Two-machine flow shop with synchronized periodic maintenance

Abstract

In the literature, some works deal with the two-machine flow shop scheduling problem under availability constraints. Most of them consider those constraints only for one machine at a time and also with limited unavailability periods. In this work, we were interested by the unlimited periodic and synchronized maintenance applied on both machines. The problem is NP-hard. We proposed a mixed integer programming model and a variable neighborhood search for solving large instances in order to minimize the makespan. Computational experiments show the efficiency of the proposed methods.