Sequence- and Time-Dependent Maintenance Scheduling in Twice Re-Entrant Flow Shops

Industrial and academic interest converge on scheduling flow shops with sequence- and time-dependent maintenance. We posit that anticipatory, integrated scheduling of operational and maintenance tasks leads to superior performance to purely ‘wait-then-fix’ handling of the maintenance tasks. Motivated by an industrial problem with (sequence dependent) setup times, maximum separation constraints, and a combination of sequence- and time- dependent maintenance tasks, this paper introduces an integer programming solution, a constraint programming solution and a heuristic solution based on list scheduling. The motivating use case provides a unique combination of concerns that is to the best of our knowledge, not yet studied in the literature. We build on existing work where we can by extending models for sequence-dependent maintenance scheduling to accommodate sequence- and time-dependent maintenance scheduling and also propose other new models. We show the relative performances of our methods through empirical evaluations and also show significant improvements – up to 25% reduction in makespan – when compared to a reactive scheduling approach that does not consider maintenance in its planning. Based on our evaluations on exact methods, constraint programming models scale better than mixed integer programming models for this problem.