Joint production and preventive maintenance controls for unreliable and imperfect manufacturing systems

Joint production system control is a challenge for researchers and a daily defy for managers and practitioners. The large concern comes from the interdependence between the system states and the control actions. Several analytical models have addressed these issues but remain inefficient because they are based on many simplifying assumptions for mathematical tractability (mainly concerning the system degradation mode). This is critical because degradation modeling impacts the overall manufacturing system and leads to an over or an under estimation of its performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient stochastic analytical model of integrated production and preventive maintenance control for manufacturing systems subject to operation-dependent degradations of both reliability and quality. A make-to-stock production strategy and an age-based preventive maintenance policy are employed to cope with uncertainty. The main objective is to jointly optimize the production and maintenance control settings by minimizing the total incurred cost. A simulation model is also developed to validate the mathematical model. Numerical examples and a detailed sensitivity analysis are provided to assess the quality of our model and to derive relevant insight and issues regarding the interaction between production, maintenance, and quality.