AN EFFICIENT HEURISTIC FOR TRANSPORT FLEET MAINTENANCE SCHEDULING IN A MAINTENANCE SYSTEM WITH LIMITED CAPACITY

In the real world, the managers of a transportation fleet need to carefully determine the maintenance cycles of vehicles so as to minimize the average total costs (including the operating costs and the maintenance costs). Furthermore, since the maintenance system is usually equipped with limited manpower and facilities, it has limited capacity to provide maintenance service for the transportation fleet. Therefore, we are motivated to determine the optimal maintenance cycle of vehicles and to generate a feasible maintenance schedule of a transport fleet in this study. To solve this problem, we first obtain candidate solutions by solving an unconstrained model using a search algorithm. Then, we test feasibility for each one of these candidate solutions. Finally, among these candidate solutions, we pick the 'best' solution that secures a feasible maintenance schedule with the minimum average costs. Based on our random experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed search algorithm could effectively solve the Transportation Fleet Maintenance Scheduling Problem in a maintenance system with limited capacity.