OPTIMAL MAINTENANCE OF A SERIES PRODUCTION SYSTEM WITH TWO MULTI-COMPONENT SUBSYSTEMS AND AN INTERMEDIATE BUFFER

Intermediate buffers often exist in practical production systems to reduce the influence of the breakdown and maintenance ef subsystems on system production. At the same time, the effects of intermediate buffers also make the degradation process of the system more difficult to model. Some existing papers investigate the performance evaluation and maintenance optimisation of a production system with intermediate buffers under a predetermined maintenance strategy structure. However, only few papers pay attention to the property of the optimal maintenance strategy structure. This paper develops a method based on the Markov decision process to identify the optimal maintenance strategy for a series-parallel system with two multi-component subsystems and an intermediate buffer. The structure of the obtained optimal maintenance strategy is analysed, which shows that the optimal strategy structure cannot be modelled by a limited number of parameters. However, some useful properties of the strategy structure are obtained, which can simplify the maintenance optimisation. Another interesting finding is that a large buffer capacity cannot always bring about high average revenue even through the cost of holding an item in the buffer is much smaller than the production revenue per item.