Production Planning and Opportunistic Preventive Maintenance for Unreliable One-Machine Two-Products Manufacturing Systems

This paper develops an effective joint production, setup and maintenance control policies in an unreliable one-machine two-products manufacturing system. The main objective is to reach a higher synchronization level of the preventive maintenance (PM) interventions in the planning of production activities. The proposed joint control policy integrates the concept of the opportunistic maintenance by taking advantage of the machine stoppage during setup operations in order to conduct preventive actions. This aims to increase the machine availability and to reduce the risk of shortages.Performance evaluation of the proposed control policy is carried out using a combined continuous/discrete event simulation model. It is subsequently analyzed by statistical techniques of optimization such as design of experiments, analysis of variance and response surface methodology. An illustrative numerical example followed by an in-depth comparison study for a wide range of the system configurations are performed in order to demonstrate the usefulness and the robustness of the results.