Application of a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm to Ship Maintenance Scheduling

Abstract

Ship maintenance scheduling is a process to decide start times of maintenance activities that satisfy all precedence and resource constraints and optimize ship availability. In this paper, ship maintenance scheduling is modelled as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). The variables of the CSP are the start times and its domain values are the origin and horizon of the schedule. To solve ship maintenance scheduling problem in the Royal Malaysian Navy, we adopt a constraint-based reasoning (CBR) which requires start times of the first activities of maintenance cycles to solve the problem by the CBR. Thus, we adopt a genetic algorithm (GA) to find the start times of a set of first maintenance activities. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the present hybrid algorithm.