Article ID: | iaor20082973 |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Volume: | 43 |
Issue: | 5 |
Start Page Number: | 591 |
End Page Number: | 609 |
Publication Date: | Sep 2007 |
Journal: | Transportation Research. Part E, Logistics and Transportation Review |
Authors: | Miller-Hooks Elise, Tang Hao, Tomastik Robert |
Keywords: | maintenance, repair & replacement, scheduling, heuristics: tabu search, programming: travelling salesman |
A real-world planned maintenance scheduling problem that exists at several business units within United Technologies Corporation (UTC) is addressed in this paper. The scheduling problem is formulated as a multiple tour maximum collection problem with time-dependent rewards and an adaptive memory tabu search heuristic is developed to solve it. The effectiveness of the proposed solution approach is examined using real-world problem instances supplied by UTC. Relevant upper bounds are derived for the application. Results of numerical experiments indicate that the proposed tabu search heuristic is able to obtain near optimal solutions for large-size (i.e., actual) problem instances in reasonable computation time.