Joint production, maintenance, and quality control in manufacturing systems with imperfect inspection

This paper proposed a joint production control, preventive maintenance, and inspection policy for manufacturing systems prone to failures, quality degradation and quality inspection errors. A stochastic mathematical model is developed taking into account all possible scenarios contingent to imperfect quality inspection errors, while integrating age-based preventive maintenance, dynamic production rates, and sampling inspection plans. The model accounts for both Type I and Type II inspection errors and optimizes the joint policy key parameters, including safety stock levels, preventive maintenance thresholds, and inspection sample size. The model is validated using a 95 % confidence interval obtained from experiments with simulation model that imitates the studied system dynamics when it is controlled by the proposed joint policy. A sensitivity analysis is carried out to give a deeper comprehension of the problem and the complex interactions at play. The study explores the impact of system's parameters on the new joint policy that accounts for inspection errors, thereby contributing valuable insights to the field of manufacturing systems management. Ultimately, a comprehensive comparative analysis seeks to establish the superiority of the proposed joint policy over existing ones documented in the literature. The proposed policy consistently outperformed alternative approaches, with an overall cost reduction of up to 87 %.