Scheduling maintenance during production scheduling in multi-factory supply chain

In recent years, many companies have been changing their framework from traditional single-factory to multi-factory production in order to increase their international competitiveness because of globalization. These factories may be geographically distributed in different locations. Production scheduling in multi-factory environments can be classified as Distributed Scheduling (DS) problems. One of the main focuses in DS is to maximize the system reliability and the resources utilization. However, many existing literatures usually ignored machine maintenance during the production scheduling. In reality, every machine requires maintenance, and the maintenance policy applied will directly influence the machine availability, and consequently the production scheduling. This paper applies a genetic optimization approach named Genetic Algorithm with Dominant Gene (GADG) to deal with the problem and demonstrates the significance of scheduling maintenance during DS.