An effective Hybrid Petri net and Tabu Search for Parallel Machines Scheduling with Availability Constraint.

Machines can become unavailable during the planning horizon due to unexpected breakdowns. Such periods of unavailability should be properly taken into account when designing the production schedule. This paper proposes an optimal solution to unrelated parallel machine scheduling problems with availability constraints based on timed Petri nets (TPNs) to minimize the maximum completion time of jobs. For this NP-hard problem, a new hybrid Petri net and tabu search (PNTS) approach is proposed to find an optimal solution for this problem. A numerical example is used to assess the performance of the proposed PNTS. The computational results highlight the ability of the proposed PNTS to obtain optimal solutions for this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]