Service-oriented global optimization integrating maintenance grouping and technician routing for multi-location multi-unit production systems

Abstract

With the product-service requirement of modern production enterprises, service-oriented manufacturing and its corresponding operations and maintenance have gained growing attention. Advances in sensor technology and wireless communication, promoting lessors to propose new strategies for intelligent maintenance decision-making of geographically distributed manufacturing enterprises. In this article, we present a comprehensive strategy for solving the maintenance grouping and technician routing problem of multi-location multi-unit production systems. Based on real-time machine degradation, we estimate the failure rate of leased machines and establish a time-varying maintenance cost function to quantify the trade-off between early maintenance and delayed maintenance. Unlike group maintenance of a single system, we integrate the travel time between systems and the maintenance capacity of technician teams into a mixed-integer optimization model to provide the dynamic preventive maintenance scheme. Finally, numerical examples are employed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy and explore some managerial insights for the lessor’s daily management.

Keywords:

• Service-oriented manufacturing
• group maintenance
• technician routing
• multi-location multi-unit production systems
• cost saving

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions that helped to significantly improve this article.

Additional information

Funding

The authors greatly acknowledge supports form the Nation Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 51875359; Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai under Grant 20ZR1428600; Shanghai Science & Technology Innovation Center for System Engineering of Commercial Aircraft under Grant FASE-2021-M7; and Ministry of Education-China Mobile Research Foundation under Grant MCM20180703.

Notes on contributors

Guojin Si

Guojin Si received BS degree in mechanical engineering from the Sichuan University. She is currently studying for a PhD degree in mechanical engineering (industrial engineering) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her doctoral studies focus on leasehold network modelling and maintenance decision making for prognostic & health management and condition-based maintenance.

Tangbin Xia

Tangbin Xia is an Associate Professor and serves as Deputy Director of the Department of Industrial Engineering & Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received a PhD degree in mechanical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research interests include intelligent maintenance systems, prognostics & health management, and advanced manufacturing.

Ershun Pan

Ershun Pan is currently a Professor and the Head of the Department of Industrial Engineering & Management, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He previously worked in the University of Michigan as a visiting scholar. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of the theory and methods of quality control, reliability engineering and maintenance strategy, and lean manufacturing technology.

Lifeng Xi

Lifeng Xi is currently a Professor and serves as Vice President of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He also serves as the Editorial Director of Industrial Engineering & Management, and the Executive Director of the Chinese Quality Association. His interest areas are in the fields of production system design and planning, quality management, and reliability engineering.