Integrated production and non-cyclical maintenance planning in flow-shop environment with limited buffer

In this paper, we work on a problem of determination of production and maintenance scheduling as well as the production lot sizes in flow-shop environment with limited buffer. We introduce a new mathematical model that can schedule production and non-cyclical maintenance activities. The objective of the problem is minimising the total costs consisting of production, setup, inventory and preventive maintenance costs. A method for linearising the mathematical model is introduced. Since the problem is NP-hard, solving the problem with proposed mathematical model in large and medium sizes is hard and time consuming. Hence, two heuristic algorithms based on fix and optimise approach are developed. For checking the solution quality, the numerical results of heuristic algorithms are compared with optimal solution, lower bound value and the best answer that gained among the examples.