Integrated production planning and preventive maintenance in deteriorating production systems

This paper discusses the issue of integrating production planning and preventive maintenance in manufacturing production systems. In particular, it tackles the problem of integrating production and preventive maintenance in a system composed of parallel failure-prone production lines. It is assumed that when a production line fails, a minimal repair is carried out to restore it to an ‘as-bad-as-old’ status. Preventive maintenance is carried out, periodically at the discretion of the decision maker, to restore the production line to an ‘as-good-as-new’ status. It is also assumed that any maintenance action, performed on a production line in a given period, reduces the available production capacity on the line during that period. The resulting integrated production and maintenance planning problem is modeled as a nonlinear mixed-integer program when each production line implements a cyclic preventive maintenance policy. When noncyclical preventive maintenance policies are allowed, the problem is modeled as a linear mixed-integer program. A Lagrangian-based heuristic procedure for the solution of the first planning model is proposed and discussed. Computational experiments are carried out to analyze the performance of the method for different failure rate distributions, and the obtained results are discussed in detail.