A scheduling model for serial jobs on parallel machines with different preventive maintenance (PM)

In factories during production, preventive maintenance (PM) scheduling is an important problem in preventing and predicting the failure of machines, and most other critical tasks. In this paper, we present a new method of PM scheduling in two modes for more precise and better machine maintenance, as pieces must be replaced or be repaired. Because of the importance of this problem, we define multi-objective functions including makespan, PM cost, variance tardiness, and variance cost; we also consider multi-parallel series machines that perform multiple jobs on each machine and an aid, the analytic network process, to weight these objectives and their alternatives. PM scheduling is an NP-hard problem, so we use a dynamic genetic algorithm (GA) (the probability of mutation and crossover is changed through the main GA) to solve our algorithm and present another heuristic model (particle swarm optimization) algorithm against which to compare the GA's answer. At the end, a numerical example shows that the presented method is very useful in implementing and maintaining machines and devices.