Integrated planning of maintenance operations and workload allocation

Abstract

Motivated by a practical problem, this paper investigates the integrated planning of maintenance operations and workload allocation on a set of machines in a workshop. Given quantities of products to be produced per period on a planning horizon must be processed on unrelated flexible machines. Moreover, each machine has to undergo one or more maintenance operations that must be planned within a given time window and impact products differently. The main goal is to find a feasible plan that satisfies the machine capacity by allocating the production quantities to machines and assigning maintenance operations as late as possible in their time windows. Various original mathematical models are presented. In particular, we propose models that allow maintenance operations and some production quantities to overlap two consecutive periods. Computational experiments based on industrial data show that allowing this overlapping helps the earliness of maintenance operations to be significantly reduced in the most difficult instances, going for example from a total of 14 periods to only 1 period, and by more than 35% on average.

Keywords:

• Maintenance
• workload allocation
• planning
• mathematical modelling

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The industrial data are not publicly available due to their confidentiality.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly funded by the French Public Authorities through the Nano 2022 program, which is part of IPCEI (Important Project of Common European Interest).

Notes on contributors

Melek Rodoplu

Melek Rodoplu is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Manufacturing Sciences and Logistics at the Center of Microelectronics in Provence (CMP) of the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France. She received the Ph.D. degree from the Troyes University of Technology (UTT), France, in 2019. Her research interests include modeling and optimization of operations at various decision levels in manufacturing and logistic, with a special attention on production planning and scheduling and energy management in production systems.

Stéphane Dauzère-Pérès

Stéphane Dauzère-Pérès is Professor at Mines Saint-Etienne in its site of Gardanne, France, and Adjunct Professor at BI Norwegian Business School, Norway. He received the Ph.D. degree from Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France, in 1992 and the H.D.R. from Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, France, in 1998. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at M.I.T., U.S.A., in 1992 and 1993, and Research Scientist at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 1994. He has been Associate Professor and Professor from 1994 to 2004 at the Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France. His research interests broadly include modeling and optimization of operations at various decision levels (from real-time to strategic) in manufacturing and logistics, with a special emphasis on production planning (lot sizing) and scheduling, on semiconductor manufacturing and on railway operations. He has published 99 papers in international journals and has contributed to more than 250 communications in national and international conferences. Stéphane Dauzère-Pérès has coordinated numerous academic and industrial research projects, including 4 European projects and 30 industrial (CIFRE) PhD theses, and also eight conferences. He was runner-up in 2006 of the Franz Edelman Award Competition, and won the Best Applied Paper of the Winter Simulation Conference in 2013 and the EURO award for the best theory and methodology EJOR paper in 2021.

Philippe Vialletelle

Philippe Vialletelle is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at STMicroelectronics Crolles, France. He received an Engineering degree in Physics from the INSA Rennes in 1989. Philippe spent his entire professional life in the semiconductor industry where he occupied various positions, mostly in manufacturing support functions. He has been defining and driving research and innovation activities for STMicroelectronics in various collaborative projects at European level. He directly supervised several PhD theses on modelling and optimization of manufacturing systems in the areas of production and process control, as well as factory automation and industry 4.0. At STMicroelectronics, he is now actively contributing to the development of a global semantic model within the Manufacturing Data & Analytics program which is today a strategic program of the company. His email address is [email protected].