Track: Reliability and Maintenance

Abstract

Maintenance, production scheduling, and quality control are the three important functions, which can improve the performance of a manufacturing system. In the operational context, all these shop floor activities have an interacting effect with each other. For example, while production scheduling; it is assumed that the machines are continuously available during production. However, in real manufacturing systems, machines may undergo failure and hence some unavailability periods such as preventive/corrective maintenance activities may exist during production. Similarly, preventive maintenance (PM) activities take time that could have been utilized for production purposes. Also, delaying the preventive maintenance or inadequate maintenance may degrade the machine condition which in turn may degrade the quality of the products being manufactured on the machine resulting in large amount of rework, rejection and scrap. Hence, there exists a strong interrelationship between production scheduling, maintenance and quality control. However, these shop floor activities are done mostly independent of each other.

This paper presents a methodology for combining selective maintenance, production scheduling and quality control for multi machine system. The objective is to obtain the minimum cost solution for the simultaneous decision on maintenance, production schedule and quality control. The proposed approach results in the sequence for the batches on each machine, the maintenance actions for components and the quality control parameters. A simulated annealing algorithm is used for optimization. A numerical example is presented to demonstrate the proposed approach.