Bottleneck-based opportunistic maintenance model for series production systems

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a bottleneck-based opportunistic maintenance (OM) model for the series production systems with the integration of the imperfect effect into maintenance activities. Design/methodology/approach – On the analysis of availability and maintenance cost, preventive maintenance (PM) models subjected to imperfect maintenance for different equipment types are built. And then, a cost-saving function of OM is established to find out an optimal OM strategy, depending on whether the front-bottleneck machines adopt OM strategy or not. A numerical example is given to show how the proposed bottleneck-based OM model proceeded. Findings – The simulation results indicate that the proposed model is better than the methods to maintain the machines separately and the policy to maintain all machines when bottleneck machine reaches its reliability threshold. Furthermore, the relationship between OM strategy and corresponding parameters is identified through sensitivity analysis. Practical implications – In practical situations, the bottleneck machine always determines the throughput of the whole series production system. Whenever a PM activity is carried out on the bottleneck machine, there will be an opportunity to maintenance other machines. Under such circumstances, findings of this paper can be utilized for the determination of optimal OM policy with the objective of minimizing total maintenance cost of the system. Originality/value – This paper presents a bottleneck-based OM optimization model with the integration of the imperfect effect as a new method to schedule maintenance activities for a series production system with buffers. Furthermore, to the best of the knowledge, this paper presents the first attempt to considering the bottleneck constraint on system capacity and diverse types of machines as a means to minimize the maintenance cost and ensure the system throughput.

Optimizing block-based maintenance under random machine usage

“…The Weibull distribution is the most commonly used distribution to model lifetimes and has been found to provide a good description for many types of lifetime data (Lawless, 2002;Rinne, 2008). Recent studies that also adopt a Weibull lifetime distribution include De Jonge et al (2015b); Xia et al (2015); Xu and Cao (2015); Zhou et al (2015). The Weibull distribution has a shape parameter k and a scale parameter λ; the distribution function F W is given by F W (t) = 1 − e −(t/λ) k , t ≥ 0.…”

Reliability-Based Opportunistic Maintenance Modeling for Multi-Component Systems with Economic Dependence under Base Warranty

“…e OM strategy has drawn a lot of attention from scholars, and the OM model has a wide range of applications in engineering systems. Many pieces of literature have studied OM in depth and many kinds of OM models have been introduced [33,34]. Related theoretical methodologies and practical applications in OM were reviewed and summarized by Ab-Samat [35].…”

Optimization of condition‐based maintenance considering partial opportunities

“…[5][6][7] Most existing OM studies consider the combination of OM of a certain component with maintenance activities of other components (e.g., group maintenance). [8][9][10][11] Other types of opportunity which have been investigated are system stoppages due to production causes such as the blockage or starvation of product flow or production waits, 12 stops of bottleneck machines, 13 or the setup time between productions of two successive batches. 14 Some other studies considered general external opportunities.…”