Investigation of maintenance float problem using genetic algorithms

Maintenance float problems in a flexible manufacturing system tend to become analytically intractable while the assumptions of their models become more complex and practical; consequently, they are too complex to solve by traditional optimization theories; and therefore, a heuristic algorithm or an enumerative search method is always used to solve them. To tackle the problems, in this study, we solve them by a genetic algorithm which is often implemented to search the global optimization in a complex search space. The numerical example shows that our approach can find the optimal solution of these problems with less effort.