A real-time maintenance scheduling policy in serial production lines

In this paper, we carry out a simulation study to integrate preventive maintenance scheduling policy with real-time production system analysis and workforce dispatching rule to investigate the impact of such a policy on system productivity. The preventive maintenance is triggered by the threshold of number of breakdowns and current up- and downstream buffer status, with the maintenance workforce being dispatched based on dynamic bottleneck policy. It is shown that the system performance can be improved by implementing such a real-time scheduling policy.