SRBFO Algorithm for Production Scheduling with Mold and Machine Maintenance Consideration

A good production scheduling integrated with preventive maintenance scheduling scheme is significant for maintaining a higher reliability and stability for manufactory system. In this paper production scheduling problem with mold and machine maintenance (PS-MMS) consideration is studied and solved by structure-redesign-based bacterial foraging optimization (SRBFO) algorithm. PPS-MMS is a typical discrete combination optimization problem that allocating a certain number of jobs to available machine and mold and integrating maintenance activities for machine and mold with production activities. Unlike traditional maintenance activities operated with fixed duration, the maintenance duration in our PS-MMS model is varying with the usage age of machine/mold. To obtain a better solution for this difficult problem in acceptable time, SRBFO is adopted by encoding and decoding of bacteria on every dimension so that each bacterium can represent a potential solution. Five different scale instances were selected as test problems, experimental results demonstrated that SRBFO is more suitable than PSO to deal with PS-MMS problem in terms of the stability from the best solutions.