An integrated ACO approach for the joint production and preventive maintenance scheduling problem in the flowshop sequencing problem

In this paper, an integrated ACO approach to solve joint production and preventive maintenance scheduling problem in permutation flowshops is considered. A newly developed ant-colony algorithm is proposed and analyzed for solving this problem, based on a common representation of production and maintenance data, to obtain a joint schedule that is, subsequently, improved by a new local search procedure. The goal is to optimize a common objective function which takes into account both maintenance and production criteria. We compare the results obtained with our algorithm to those of an integrated genetic algorithm developed in previous works. The results and experiments carried out indicate that the proposed ant-colony algorithm provide very effective solutions for this problem.