Applying Ant Colony Optimization for the Joint Production and Preventive Maintenance Scheduling Problem in the Flowshop Sequencing Problem

In this paper a sequential resolution of the joint production and preventive maintenance scheduling problem in permutation flowshops is considered with the objective of minimizing the makespan. The proposed sequential algorithm, called SAS, consists of two steps: first the scheduling of the production jobs with Ant System algorithm (AS) by Dorigo and al. (1996) is considered. Then the insertion of the maintenance tasks is done according to several heuristics developed in previous works, taking the production scheduling as a strong constraint. Computational experiments are conducted on a large set of instances and the resulting joint ACO is presented.