Optimal production and non-periodic maintenance plan for a degrading serial production system with uncertain demand

Abstract

Over the past few decades, economic globalisation has intensified the competition among international enterprises. So, firms are working hard to improve their performances to stay competitive in markets. In the industrial domain, firms are continuously looking for the improvement of their production systems’ availability and the optimisation of production planning to assure the satisfaction of a random demand. Therefore, joint maintenance and production optimisation have been receiving increasing attention from researchers and firms. This study deals with joint nonperiodic preventive maintenance and production planning optimisation with regard to a manufacturing system composed of several machines mounted in series. The relationship between failure rate and production is considered to indicate the influence of variation of the production rate on the failure rate along with the average number of failures. The non-periodic preventive maintenance with respect to the production planning is proposed, to assure the continuity of the machines’ reliability by minimising the failures. In this paper, a mixed-integer-linear programme is developed to jointly find the optimal planning of integrated non-periodic preventive maintenance to production by minimising the total cost. Experimental results are presented to study the impact of the failure rate threshold on the number and periods of preventive maintenance actions.