Technician Collaboration and Routing Optimization in Global Maintenance Scheduling for Multi-Center Service Networks

Abstract

With the popularization of service-oriented manufacturing, the current operation & maintenance (O&M) has shifted from traditional in-house maintenance to proactive outsourcing maintenance. It is paramount for an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to provide timely and cost-effective maintenance schemes to geographically distributed customer enterprises. Interestingly, transportation theories could be combined to facilitate multi-location O&M management. In this paper, a transportation-oriented cross-regional opportunistic maintenance (TCOM) policy is developed for solving O&M optimizations and planning real-time schemes for the multi-center service network. The optimization model of this TCOM policy addresses several inter-related decisions: (1) most suitable maintenance times for each leased machine, (2) cost-effective arrangements of technician teams to perform maintenance tasks, and (3) optimal service routes for required teams. We not only integrate maintenance grouping and technician routing, but also investigate the new issues arising from the collaborative sharing of technician teams belonging to different maintenance centers. Numerical examples show that this TCOM policy can achieve significant cost-saving in cross-regional maintenance grouping and multi-location routing optimization for OEMs. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —This paper is motivated by the critical problem of computing an optimal maintenance policy for the multi-center service network of geographically distributed production systems to achieve a timely and cost-effective O&M management. We consider individual machine degradations, complex maintenance opportunities and network logistics optimization to establish a global maintenance scheme for the multi-center service network. The existing approaches are to schedule the preventive maintenance (PM) for a single machine or multi-unit leased system, which is unilateral and cannot be applied to multi-location production systems. Although the network opportunistic maintenance policy has been proposed in the literature for maintenance grouping and technician routing problem, it still does not consider the limited workforce resource and the collaborative sharing of technician teams from different maintenance centers. To fill this literature gap, in this paper, we develop the TCOM policy to determine the optimal maintenance timetable for leased machines, as well as the cost-effective service route of technician teams belonging to multiple maintenance centers, so as to conduct timely and cost-effective PM on multi-location production systems. Compared with the conventional maintenance policy, our adaptive policy greatly reduces the total outsourcing maintenance cost in long-term O&M services.