Preventive maintenance scheduling for serial multi-station manufacturing systems with interaction between station reliability and product quality

Station reliability and product quality usually interact with each other stochastically in the multi-station manufacturing systems, which brings much trouble for the preventive maintenance (PM) scheduling of the system. In this paper, a station reliability evaluation method is developed firstly based on the introduced bidirectional interaction mechanism between station reliability and product quality, in which the focus is on the derivation of the failure rate of the stations. Then, a dynamic opportunistic PM (OM) policy is presented for the series multi-station systems with such quality integrated station reliability. The OM model is built up based on an extended cost saving method, and the optimal PM scheme of the system is obtained by maximizing the short-term cost savings which not only come from the stations conducting PM but also come from the downstream stations of those PM stations. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate how this PM scheduling approach works, and a numerical comparison on different OM policies is also given to show the effectiveness of the proposed OM policy under such interaction between station reliability and product quality.