Bi-objective optimization for integrating production and preventive maintenance scheduling in two-stage assembly flow shop problem

Abstract

This paper presents a new bi-objective mixed integer programming model for the two-stage assembly flow shop scheduling problem with preventive maintenance (PM) activities, in which the reliability/availability approach is employed to model the maintenance concepts of a problem. PM activities carry out the operations on machines and tools before the breakdown takes place. Therefore, it helps to prevent failures before they happen. After developing a new bi-objective model, an Epsilon-constraint method is proposed to solve the problem. This problem has been known as Np-hard. Therefore, three multi-objective optimization methods, namely fast non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm, Multi-objective imperialist competitive algorithm, and non-dominated ranking genetic algorithm (NRGA) are employed to find the pareto-optimal front for large sized problems. The parameters of the proposed algorithms are calibrated using artificial neural network (ANN) and the performances of the proposed algorithms on the problems of various sizes are analyzed and the computational results reveal that NRGA outperform than two other proposed algorithms in quality of solutions and computational time.