Joint Scheduling of Jobs and Variable Maintenance Activities in the Flowshop Sequencing Problems: Review, Classification and Opportunities

Much of the scheduling theory assumes that machines are always available to process jobs at any time during the scheduling horizon. However, machines may be unavailable for various reasons in realistic practices, such as unexpected failures or variable maintenance activities. This article discusses in depth the works published in the literature of joint scheduling of jobs and variable maintenance activities in the flowshop sequencing problems. Our literature review focuses first on the basic concepts of scheduling problems, and more specifically, the scheduling strategies of production and maintenance that have been identified in the literature. Subsequently, we focus our attention on the principal methods for solving scheduling problems, while presenting in the following the main published works for the aforementioned systems. Lastly, a comparative analysis is carried out to highlight the fundamental ideas leading to the adoption of an effective approach capable of producing an optimal solution in a reasonable calculation time.