A QMM-MOP methodology for the maintenance scheduling of multistage manufacturing systems with a stream of deterioration

Abstract

In multistage manufacturing systems, a stream-of-deterioration (SOD) phenomenon poses two challenges for effective preventive-maintenance (PM) scheduling. First, the deterioration of each machine contributes to the deterioration of the final-product quality, and thus timely PM should be conducted to prevent excessive quality deterioration. Second, the deterioration of different machines leads to different degrees of deterioration in the final-product quality; thus, the PM of different machines will result in different degrees of improvement in the final-product quality. To address both challenges, a QMM-MOP methodology that adopts an interactive bi-level scheduling framework is proposed. In machine-level scheduling, a quality-integrated maintenance model (QMM) is developed by incorporating intermediate-product quality deterioration into the total cost to schedule timely PM for each individual machine. In system-level scheduling, maintenance-operation prioritization (MOP), based on a SOD-enabled quality-improvement factor, is proposed to select machines for PM. The case study shows that the proposed methodology can ensure a higher final-product quality with a lower total cost. The contribution of this paper is to develop a QMM-MOP methodology that integrates product-quality improvement into an interactive bi-level PM scheduling framework and enables MOP based on the-quality improvement factor to best improve the final-product quality.