Opportunistic Maintenance Modeling for Serial Production Systems with Stochastic Production Waits

Abstract

In order to make full use of the maintenance opportunities brought by stochastic production waits caused by external factors such as shortage of raw materials and insufficient demands, the notions of mass center and gravity windows are introduced and an opportunity maintenance decision-making model combining the time window and the gravity window is proposed for multi-unit serial production systems. Considering both internal maintenance opportunities caused by equipment mandatory maintenance and external maintenance opportunities caused by production waits, the optimal maintenance strategy is obtained by minimizing the total maintenance cost rate of the system in the planning period. The example analysis shows that the combination of the time window and the gravity window has prominent advantages in reducing the total maintenance cost, and can effectively solve the uncertainty of the arrival and duration of production waits.

Keywords

• multi-unit serial system
• production waits
• opportunistic maintenance
• maintenance time window
• maintenance gravity window