MIP formulation and heuristics for multi-stage capacitated lot-sizing and scheduling problem with availability constraints

In this paper, the problem of lot-sizing and scheduling of multiple product types in a capacitated flow shop with availability constraints for multi-period planning horizon is considered. In many real production systems, machines may be unavailable due to breakdowns or preventive maintenance activities, thus integrating lot-sizing and scheduling with maintenance planning is necessary to model real manufacturing conditions. Two variants are considered to deal with the maintenance activities. In the first, the starting times of maintenance tasks are fixed, whereas in the second one, maintenance must be carried out in a given time window. A new mixed-integer programming (MIP) model is proposed to formulate the problem with sequence-dependent setups and availability constraints. The objective is to find a production and preventive maintenance schedule that minimizes production, holding and setup costs. Three MIP-based heuristics with rolling horizon framework are developed to generate the integrated plan. Computational experiments are performed on randomly generated instances to show the efficiency of the heuristics. To evaluate the validity of the solution methods, problems with different scales have been studied and the results are compared with the lower bound. Computational experiments demonstrate that the performed methods have good-quality results for the test problems. (C) 2013 The Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.