Economic design of integrated model of control chart and maintenance management

There are two key tools for the control of production processes - Statistical Process Control (SPC) and Maintenance Management (MM), which are traditionally separated (both in science and in business practice), even though their goals overlap a great deal. Their common goal is to achieve optimal product quality, little downtime and cost reduction by controlling variances in the process. Since single or separated parallel applications may not be fully effective, this paper discusses the integration of statistical process control and maintenance, and provides an integrated model of Control Chart (CC) and MM. A mathematical model is given to analyze the cost of the integrated model and the grid-search approach is used to find the optimal values of policy variables (n, h, L, k) that minimize hourly cost. Finally, a numerical experiment is conducted to investigate the effects of cost parameters on the solution of the design. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.