Performance of a manufacturing system depends on its ability to simultaneously meet several requirements such as: quick response to market demand, high product quality, low manufacturing costs and timely deliveries; which in turn strongly depend on performance at the shop floor level. In the past, the shop floor level operational policies in the context of scheduling, maintenance and quality have been examined in isolation. However, it is hypothesised that these three aspects of operations planning may also have some interaction effect and hence joint consideration of various policy options pertaining to quality, maintenance and scheduling on the performance of the manufacturing system is an important area for investigation. In this paper, a review of literature addressing the joint consideration of these three aspects is presented and research gaps are highlighted. As a preliminary work, some numerical investigations are also presented to highlight the importance of joint consideration of these three aspects. Finally, a conceptual methodology is presented that can lead to further developments in this field. Some potential research areas in this context are identified. ) of the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (India) and the Director-in-Charge of IIT Delhi (July-December 2000). He has vast experience in teaching, research and consultancy spanning for more than 41 years. He is on the editorial board of several international journals. He has many awards and prizes to his credit. His areas of interest include productivity management, supply chain management, industrial engineering, operations research and operations management. 1 job-attributed criteria (e.g., job flow time) 2 shop-attributed criteria (e.g., machine utilisation) 3 completion-based criteria (e.g., makespan) 4 due-date-based criteria (e.g., tardiness) 5 financial criteria (e.g., job handling cost) 6 miscellaneous criteria (e.g., labour utilisation).In general, production scheduling models are often mathematical programming models designed to maximise or minimise one or more of the above measures. Solution methodologies for such models range from traditional integer programming