Simultaneously scheduling production plan and maintenance policy for a single machine with failure uncertainty

This paper addresses the problem of finding robust production and maintenance schedules for a single machine with failure uncertainty. Since both the production and maintenance activities have impacts on the machine's capacity and reliability, a joint model for integrating the production plan and maintenance policy to optimize the bi-objective of quality and solution robustness simultaneously is proposed. Then a simulation-based stochastic Genetic Algorithm is developed as a proactive scheduling approach to search for robust solutions. Computational results indicate that the solution performance can be significantly improved with our algorithm compared with the traditional way. And the balance of quality robustness and solution robustness is explored in detail.