Minimizing total absolute deviation of job completion times on a single machine with maintenance activities using a Lion Optimization Algorithm

Scheduling is a decision-making process that plays an important role in the service and production industries. Effective scheduling can assist companies to survive in the competitive market. Single machine scheduling is an important optimization problem in the scheduling research area. It can be found in a wide range of real-world engineering problems, from manufacturing to computer science. Due to the high complexity of single machine scheduling problems, developing approximation methods, particularly metaheuristic algorithms, for solving them have absorbed considerable attention. In this study, a Lion Optimization Algorithm (LOA) is employed to solve a single machine with maintenance activities, where the objective is to minimize the Total Absolute Deviation of Compilation Times (TADC). In the scheduling literature, TADC as an objective function has hardly been studied. To evaluate the performance of the LOA, it was compared against a set of well-known metaheuristics. Therefore, a set of problem was generated, and a comprehensive experimental analysis was conducted. The results of computational experiments indicate the superiority of the proposed optimization method.