A robust integrated production and preventive maintenance planning model for multi-state systems with uncertain demand and common cause failures

Abstract

Integrating production and maintenance plans is a novel solution to reduce the related errors of these basic manufacturing planning problems. The purpose of the proposed paper is to integrate production and maintenance planning in a multi-state system. Production planning is considered in regard to multi-item capacitated lot sizing problem, while the maintenance policy is divided into corrective and preventive actions. The main contribution of the proposed study is in using robust optimization approach in modeling the integrated problem when the system faces demand fluctuations. Additionally, components of the assumed multi-state system are subjected to both independent and common cause failures. The presented model has the advantage to decide between perfect or imperfect preventive maintenance to be performed. For assessing the performance of the model, small to medium size numerical examples are generated. It is shown that using robust optimization method would reduce the cost of the integrated model when there are diverse levels for demand. Besides, sensitivity analysis shows that the maintenance strategy of the proposed model returns the lowest integrated production and maintenance cost in comparison with alternative models featuring different approaches for implementing preventive maintenance activities in the generated examples.