Joint production, inspection and maintenance control policies for deteriorating system under quality constraint

Abstract

This paper studies the integration of production, sampling inspection and age-based maintenance planning for an unreliable production system subject to gradual deterioration. The deterioration process of the production unit has a twofold effect on its reliability and product quality. To mitigate the effects of such deterioration, an age-based major maintenance can be conducted, which denotes a perfect repair that restores the production unit to initial conditions. The quality control is performed through a sampling plan that inspects a fraction of the parts produced. The problem further considers that the optimal decision must be determined under a constraint on the outgoing quality required by the final customer. In this domain, standard sampling procedures are applicable only to production process that are statistically stable and under control. Nevertheless, such sampling plans disregard the interaction with production management and maintenance issues and they do not consider the effects of deterioration. In this paper a new joint control policy considering the interactions between production-quality and maintenance is proposed. A stochastic mathematical model is developed through specialized optimization techniques to solve such quality constrained problem. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach and to study the interactions between production-quality and maintenance strategies. An extensive sensitivity analysis and a comparative study are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the obtained joint control policy.