Single-machine scheduling with maintenance in a manufacturing system

As machine maintenance is required in many industries, it is usually arranged in a planned schedule. In this paper, we consider a scheduling problem with several maintenance periods where each maintenance period is required after a periodic time interval. In our research, if a job is interrupted due to maintenance, the job can be resumed when a machine becomes available. The problem can be treated as a single machine scheduling with deterministic model. A heuristic based on the variable range technique can be applied to solve the problem by providing a small set of efficient schedules with respect to the total flow time and the maximum tardiness. A decision maker can easily select a minimal objective from the small set of efficient schedules according to his preference. Computational performance of the heuristic on various sized problems is provided.