Production and preventive maintenance rates control in a failure-prone manufacturing system using discrete event simulation and simulated annealing algorithm

Abstract

Production and preventive maintenance rates control in a failure-prone manufacturing system (FPMS) was studied in the current survey. One of the most important parameters is to determine the inventory level of the buffer, because if the inventory level is low, the system is faced with shortage in time of breakdown; otherwise, holding cost will be increased. Another effective parameter is determining the time for preventive maintenance which is important to discover breakdowns before their occurrence and thus minimise the cost of corrective maintenance. The purpose of this paper was to determine the optimal production rate and time of preventive maintenance for a single-machine FPMS to minimise sum of costs of holding, shortage, corrective and preventive maintenance. The repair time and time between breakdowns have general distribution. Since the inventory level and time of preventive maintenance should be optimised simultaneously in order to obtain an optimum point, discrete event simulation and simulated annealing were used.