Abstract: Considering problem that some key resources are unavailable during aircraft assembly process, resource investment problem with resource vacations was studied. A mathematical model with objective function of minimizing the resource usage cost was built. By analyzing the influence of resource vacation on decision of job start time, a genetic algorithm was designed to code job positions. By making full use of the information in the iteration process that different start times corresponded to different target values, a method which determined the job start time based on the probability distribution was put forward to improve the mutation operation. And branch-and-bound algorithm was used to make local improvement. Comparative computational results reveal that the algorithm mentioned above can obtain approximate solution for small scale case, and improves the accuracy about 3% for the larger scale case compared with existing algorithms.

Key words: resource investment problem (RIP), resource vacation, genetic algorithm, branch-and-bound algorithm