Heuristics for scheduling maintenance and production on a single machine

This paper considers single machine scheduling with preventive maintenance. In many cases, a machine must be maintained after it continuously works for a period of time. But most papers in the literature ignore non-availability of the machine. For this reason, this paper studies the problem of scheduling processing of jobs and maintenance of machines simultaneously. The objective is to minimize total tardiness of jobs. Four heuristics are proposed to determine a good schedule that minimizes the objective function. Computational experiments are done to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithms.