Operation and preventive maintenance scheduling for containerships: Mathematical model and solution algorithm

• This study considers the operation and maintenance scheduling problem for containerships.
• A mathematical programming model is suggested to represent the new maintenance scheduling problem.
• We suggest an algorithm that determines the operation and maintenance schedules at the same time.
• To show the applicability of the model and solution algorithm, a case study is reported on real data.

This paper considers the problem of determining operation and maintenance schedules for a containership equipped with various subsystems during its sailing according to a pre-determined navigation schedule. The operation schedule, which specifies working time of each subsystem, determines the due-date of each maintenance activity and the maintenance schedule specifies the actual start time of each maintenance activity. The main constraints are subsystem requirements, workforce availability, working time limitation, and inter-maintenance time. To represent the problem mathematically, a mixed integer programming model is developed. Then, due to the complexity of the problem, we suggest a heuristic algorithm that minimizes the sum of earliness and tardiness between the due-date and the actual start time for each maintenance activity. Computational experiments were done on various test instances and the results are reported. In particular, a case study was done on a real instance and a significant amount of improvement is reported over the experience based conventional method.