An Integrated Guided Local Search considering Human Resource Constraints for the Single-machine Scheduling problem with Preventive Maintenance

This work concerns the consideration of human resource constraints in the single machine scheduling problem of both production and flexible periodic maintenance activities. We assume that a maintenance activity requires the intervention of a human resource to be treated. These human resources are characterized by a competence level and availabilities considered as strong constraints allowing or not the maintenance activities' planning. To solve this NP-hard scheduling problem, we propose a guided local search metaheuristic that embeds a post-optimization process in order to minimize both production and maintenance delays. We implemented and experimented the proposed method on two series of benchmarks. The first one focuses on small size instances. The results show that the quality of the solutions obtained by the proposed method compared to an exact one is good, and even it reaches the optimal solution in some cases. In the second one, we applied the method on large instances to show its advantages and efficiency.