Modeling and optimizing the maintenance schedule using dynamic quality and machine condition monitors in an unreliable single production system

Abstract

This work attempted to propose an integrated approach for the joint control of production, quality and maintenance where a single machine would produce one type of product. The machine would be subject to degradation process that would produce non-conform units. Based on the simultaneous operations of assessment of the machine degradation and that of the product quality, decisions to conduct maintenance activities would be proposed to improve the machine reliability. The strategy adopted in this work was to establish a link between the information from the quality indicator and the level of the machine degradation using a coupling function h(x,y) to generate a maintenance schedule. The ultimate objective of this work was to minimize the average total cost per unit of time in function of cost of maintenance and cost of production. For this purpose, a mathematical model was developed and numerical examples were implemented where optimal values of decision variables were computed.