"The Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem with Non-Fixed Availability Constraints: a Late-Acceptance Hill Climbing Approach"
Adrien Wartelle and Taha Arbaoui

With the surge of smart manufacturing and automation, production systems require sophisticated methods and approaches to solve complex scheduling problems. 
Within this context, we address the flexible job shop scheduling problem with non-fixed unavailability constraints. This problem is an extension of the classical flexible job shop scheduling in which machines have a non-fixed unavailability period that should be scheduled within a time window.This may correspond to a preventive maintenance activity or a technological upgrade that should be scheduled within a determined period. To solve the problem, we propose a fast and efficient late-acceptance hill climbing approach based on an effective encoding and two neighborhood operators. The approach is then tested on a benchmark from the literature and we show that better results are attained.