Imperfect corrective maintenance scheduling for energy efficient manufacturing systems through online task allocation method

Abstract

Maintenance management is critical in enabling a smooth production operation in a manufacturing system. Once one machine fails, a corrective maintenance (CM) is required to resume its normal operation. However, perfect CM is not always needed to restore the failed machine as good as new. A Multi-level or imperfect CM is a more realistic and economic way based on the need of production operational levels. In addition, maintenance resources such as maintenance staffs are limited in reality. Therefore, how to dispatch the limited maintenance workforce with an appropriate level of CM is critical since it directly impacts the overall system’s productivity, energy efficiency and cost. This paper aims at creating a real-time CM scheduling policy to reduce the overall maintenance and energy related cost for a stochastic serial production line. To accomplish the goal, the CM scheduling problem is formulated as an online task allocation (OTA) problem. The expected cost rate of the serial production line is introduced and used to define the payoff function of the OTA problem. A numerical case study is provided to evaluate the effectiveness of the OTA based maintenance policy by comparing with other heuristic policies.