Optimization of Maintenance Planning and Routing Problems
Abstract
This paper addresses a problem that maintenance service providers often face: determining the best routing-maintenance policy for all technicians and machines. It consists of defining for each technician the sequence of the maintenance operations to perform so that the total expected costs are minimized while maintaining a high service level on machines availability. We propose in this paper a mathematical model with different objective functions which integrates both routing and maintenance considerations. To solve the problem, we propose constructive and improvement heuristics and a Variable Neighborhood Search that uses sequentially different neighborhood structures. The performance of our algorithms is evaluated using new generated instances. Results provide strong evidence of the effectiveness of our heuristic approach.