Hypergraph-based joint optimization of spare part provision and maintenance scheduling for serial-parallel multi-station manufacturing systems

Abstract

This paper studies the joint modeling of spare part provision and maintenance scheduling for Serial-Parallel Multi-station Manufacturing Systems (SPMMS), where the spare part connections are especially investigated. In the SPMMS, multiple types of spare parts are retained for uncertain failures of the stations, and multiple stations may share the spare parts in inventory. To describe the spare part connections among the stations, a hypergraph-based model is introduced. In the system-level maintenance, the SPMMS is formulated to be a multi-connection hypergraph, with the Spare Part Hyperedges (SPH), the cost-saving hyperedges and the capacity-loss hyperedge involved. Based on the multi-connection hypergraph, a Combination-Spread Opportunistic Maintenance (CSOM) policy is proposed. To obtain the optimal alternatives of the maximum inventory levels, the length of the combination window and the length of the spread window, a hierarchical optimization method is developed. The case study and the comparisons show that the proposed hypergraph-based CSOM policy is more cost-effective than the traditional maintenance policy, the station-level maintenance policy and the fixed-group maintenance policy. Finally, the discussion shows that the traditional maintenance model is a special scenario of the hypergraph-based model.