Integrated production and imperfect preventive maintenance planning: An effective MILP-based Relax-and-Fix/Fix-and-Optimize Method

This paper investigates the integrated production and imperfect preventive maintenance planning problem. The main objective is to determine an optimal combined production and maintenance strategy that concurrently minimizes production as well as maintenance costs during a given finite planning horizon. To enhance the quality of the solution and improve the computational time, we reconsider the reformulation of the problem proposed in (Aghezzaf et al., 2016) and then solved it with an effective MILP-based Relax-and-Fix/Fix-andOptimize method (RFFO). The results of this Relax-and-Fix/Fix-and-Optimize technique were also compared to those obtained by a Dantzig-Wolfe Decomposition (DWD) technique applied to this same reformulation of the problem. The results of this analysis show that the RFFO technique provides quite good solutions to the test problems with a noticeable improvement in computational time. DWD on the other hand exhibits a good improvement in terms of computational times, however, the quality of the solution still requires some more improvements