Joint control of dynamic maintenance and production in a failure-prone manufacturing system subjected to deterioration

Abstract

Abstract This paper addresses the integrated control of dynamic maintenance and production in a deteriorating manufacturing system. The previous literature on the integrated control of production and maintenance usually ignores maintenance opportunities that may arise during machines’ failures. Therefore, this paper proposes a dynamic maintenance policy which comprises of corrective, preventive and opportunistic maintenance. Opportunistic maintenance uses the downtime of machines as potential opportunities to perform maintenance on other machines. In this paper, control of dynamic maintenance is integrated with production to achieve the minimal total production cost, which includes costs of inventory, backlog, repair, preventive and opportunistic maintenance. By applying an approximation technique and the value iteration algorithm, the authors obtain a near optimal control policy for the deteriorating manufacturing system. In addition, the authors compare the performance of the obtained control policy with that of a previous control policy reported in the literature. The sensitivity analysis is also conducted to examine the effect of some system parameters on the configuration of the control policy. With the proposed control policy, industry practitioners are able to avoid unnecessary preventive maintenance and fully utilize the opportunistic time window to improve system reliability while achieving minimal total production cost.