Comparison of new metaheuristics, for the solution of an integrated jobs-maintenance scheduling problem

This paper presents and compares new metaheuristics to solve an integrated jobs-maintenance scheduling problem, on a single machine subjected to aging and failures. The problem, introduced by Zammori et al. (2014), was originally solved using the Modified Harmony Search (MHS) metaheuristic. However, an extensive numerical analysis brought to light some structural limits of the MHS, as the analysis revealed that the MHS is outperformed by the simpler Simulated Annealing by Ishibuchi et al. (1995). Aiming to solve the problem in a more effective way, we integrated the MHS with local minima escaping procedures and we also developed a new Cuckoo Search metaheuristic, based on an innovative Levy Flight. A thorough comparison confirmed the superiority of the newly developed Cuckoo Search, which is capable to find better solutions in a smaller amount of time. This an important result, both for academics and practitioners, since the integrated job-maintenance scheduling problem has a high operational relevance, but it is known to be extremely hard to be solved, especially in a reasonable amount of time. Also, the developed Cuckoo Search has been designed in an extremely flexible way and it can be easily readapted and applied to a wide range of combinatorial problems. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.