Integrated production and maintenance planning for a deteriorating system under uncertain demands

To deal with today’s tough competitions, many companies have put investments into highly automated production systems with sophisticated machines. To achieve optimum performance and economic benefits, the production system is desired to operate at the maximum capacity. To keep the production process at a low cost and to satisfy customer demands, manufacturing companies have to lay appropriate production plans. In most existing studies, it is often assumed that the production process is perfect and no machine failure occurs during production planning horizon. This, however, is not the case in practice. During production many machines deteriorate due to aging or wearing, and eventually lead to failures. When a failure occurs, maintenance actions have to be performed, which decreases the capacity of the machine and disturb the initial production plan. Perturbation of production planning in an emergency situation is costly and leads to deterioration of the product quality and the service level. Therefore, it is vital to integrate the production planning and maintenance policy into a coherent strategy so as to hedge against the unexpected failures and production re-planning.