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Scheduling a maintenance activity on parallel identical machines
Author(s) -
Levin Asaf,
Mosheiov Gur,
Sarig Assaf
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
naval research logistics (nrl)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.665
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1520-6750
pISSN - 0894-069X
DOI - 10.1002/nav.20324
Subject(s) - computer science , scheduling (production processes) , mathematical optimization , heuristic , job shop scheduling , electricity , dynamic programming , time complexity , upper and lower bounds , mathematics , algorithm , mathematical analysis , schedule , electrical engineering , engineering , operating system
We study a problem of scheduling a maintenance activity on parallel identical machines, under the assumption that all the machines must be maintained simultaneously. One example for this setting is a situation where the entire system must be stopped for maintenance because of a required electricity shut‐down. The objective is minimum flow‐time. The problem is shown to be NP‐hard, and moreover impossible to approximate unless P = N P . We introduce a pseudo‐polynomial dynamic programming algorithm, and show how to convert it into a bicriteria FPTAS for this problem. We also present an efficient heuristic and a lower bound. Our numerical tests indicate that the heuristic provides in most cases very close‐to‐optimal schedules. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 2009