Planning production and preventive maintenance in a flexible manufacturing system: a stochastic control approach

The authors deal with a continuous-time stochastic control model designed for planning production and preventive maintenance in a flexible manufacturing system. This model extends previous formulations due to G.J. Olsder and R. Suri (1980) or J. Kimemia and S.B. Gershwin (1985) by including an age-dependent machine failure rate and by allowing the control to influence some jump rates (namely, the preventive maintenance activities). By using an adaptation to the case of piecewise deterministic systems of the approximation technique initially proposed by H.J. Kushner (1977) in the realm of the optimal control of diffusions, it is shown how it is possible to compute the optimal control for a two-machine system