Coordinated overhaul scheduling of production units

This article presents a new approach to solve the problem of coordinating the overhaul scheduling of several nonidentical production units. For each production unit, the paper assumes that the operating cost is an n-order polynomial function of the time elapsed since its previous overhaul. It develops an efficient iterative algorithm that generates a near-optimal cyclic overhaul schedule. The paper also constructs a simple algorithm for the case where the overhaul interval for each production unit and the cycle time are restricted to be power-of-two multiples of some base planning period. Finally, it provides a worst-case performance bound for the solution to the problem under the power-of-two restriction.