Heuristics for the Economic Production Quantity Problem under Restrictions on Production and Maintenance Time

This paper proposes an economic production quantity problem with the maximal production run time and minimal preventive maintenance time over a finite planning horizon. The objective is to find the efficient production and maintenance policy to minimize the total cost composed of production, maintenance, shortages, and holding costs under the restriction on the production run time and the preventive maintenance time. The production and maintenance decisions include the production and maintenance frequencies and the production run and the maintenance time. The variability and the boundedness of the production run and maintenance time make the problem difficult to solve. Two heuristic algorithms are developed using different techniques based on the optimal properties of the relaxed problem. The performance comparison between the two algorithms is illustrated by numerical examples. The numerical results show that, for the most part, there exists a heuristic algorithm which is more effective than the other.