Performance evaluation of centralized maintenance workshop by using Queuing Networks

Maintenance workshop integrated in the job-shop system is required in order to maintain the production machines, to ensure the continuity of service and thus to contribute to the improvement of the availability. The objective is to propose a maintenance workshop where all corrective maintenance activities are centralized. When a failed equipment from the production workshop occurs, it is sent to the maintenance workshop in order to be repaired with a given arrival rate. The aim is to maximize the operational availability of the production workshop by reducing the sojourn time in the maintenance workshop. This paper proposes a methodology to design the Central Maintenance Workshop, which enables us to evaluate the performance in terms of cost and sojourn time, for a given budget. For that, we propose a modeling framework based on the queuing network models. Simulation results are given in order to illustrate the influence of different parameters, like arrival rate of the failed equipments and the waiting time of the equipment.