¹Nankai University, PR China

Correspondence: Dr X Qi, Department of Computer and System Sciences, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, PR China. E-mail: chenqs@sun.nankai.edu.cn

Received April 1998; Accepted April 1999.

Abstract

This paper considers a single machine scheduling problem with preventive maintenance. In many cases, a machine must be maintained after it continuously works for a period of time. But most papers in the literature ignore non-availability of the machine. For this reason, this paper studies the problem of scheduling processing of jobs and maintenance of machine simultaneously. The objective is to minimise total completion time of jobs. The problem is proved to be NP-hard in the strong sense. Three heuristic algorithms and a branch and bound algorithm are proposed. Computational experiments are done to evaluate the effectiveness of the algorithms.