Machine scheduling with an availability constraint

Most literature in scheduling assumes that machines are available simultaneously at all times. However, this availability may not be true in real industry settings. In this paper, we assume that the machine may not always be available. This happens often in the industry due to a machine breakdown (stochastic) or preventive maintenance (deterministic) during the scheduling period. We study the scheduling problem under this general situation and for the deterministic case. We discuss various performance measures and various machine environments. In each case, we either provide a polynomial optimal algorithm to solve the problem or prove that the problem is NP-hard. In the latter case, we develop pseudo-polynomial dynamic programming models to solve the problem optimally and/or provide heuristics with an error bound analysis.