Abstract
One of the most important assumptions in production scheduling is permanent availability of the machines without any breakdown. In real-world scheduling problems, machines could be unavailable due to various reasons such as preventive maintenance and unpredicted breakdowns. In this paper, a flowshop scheduling problem under machine breakdown uncertainty is studied. The machines are subject to breakdown in practice caused by components’ wear-out. A proactive scheduling is considered to deal with unpredictable machine breakdown. An effective hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm based on genetic and simulated annealing algorithms is proposed to tackle such an NP-hard problem. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, its performance in terms of maximising the β-robustness of makespan was compared with six other heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms. Computational results confirm that the proposed algorithm outperforms the others.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).