Maintenance scheduling for flexible multistage manufacturing systems with uncertain demands

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a maintenance scheduling method for the flexible multistage manufacturing system in multi-specification and small-batch production. The bi-directional interactions between the production and the deterioration of the station, and the uncertainty of the future production demands are mainly involved. The workload of each station changes with the dynamic production schedule, which will have a marked impact on the deterioration of the station. Meanwhile, the deterioration state of the station will in turn influence the selection of the station to complete the production tasks. Based on this interaction, a load integrated deterioration model is established, and then a cost-effective maintenance scheduling model is proposed for the system. Because of the uncertainty of the future production demands, the optimal preventive maintenance scheme for the system is obtained by minimizing the expected total maintenance cost per unit time within the next uncertain production period. To simplify the solving process, a greedy constraint algorithm is developed, with the duration of preventive maintenance being as the constraint. Numerical comparisons show that the expected total maintenance cost under the proposed maintenance scheduling model is always lower than the one under the full load model and the average load model.

KEYWORDS:

• Flexible multistage manufacturing system
• maintenance scheduling
• multi-specification and small-batch
• uncertain demands
• load integrated deterioration model

Acknowledgements

This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 51575356).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number 51575356].

Notes on contributors

Xiaojun Zhou

Xiaojun Zhou is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering, Shanghai Jiaotong University, P.R.China. He received the Ph.D. degree from Shanghai Jiaotong University. In 2005, he was a visiting scholar in University of Michigan, USA. His research focuses on the maintenance management, modeling and decision making for manufacturing systems. He has been in charge of two projects from National Natural Science Foundation of China, and two projects from Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai. He is currently the author of more than 50 papers on maintenance.

Mixin Zhu

Mixin Zhu is currently pursuing the M.S. degree in industrial engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University. His research focuses on the preventive maintenance modeling for multistage systems with uncertain demands.

Wenli Yu

Wenli Yu is currently pursuing the M.S. degree in industrial engineering at Shanghai Jiaotong University. Her research focuses on the condition based maintenance modeling for multi-component systems with deterioration interaction.