Decision Making Based on Fuzzy Logic for Product Subcontracting Taking into Account Maintenance Actions

This paper deals with the decision of subcontracting or not the production of parts taking into account maintenance actions. Indeed, when deciding to use subcontracting for the manufacturing of products, the industry usually focuses on its production capacity and forgets to take into account the effects of its maintenance actions. Then, the purpose of this paper is to present a method where the closeness to the next maintenance action as well as the production capacity is taken into account to make the subcontracting decision. This method is based on fuzzy logic as it simplifies the decision making when having to analyze the effects of the amount of parts to deliver, its deadline and the closeness of the next preventive maintenance action. Numerical results are given for a simple manufacturing system which consists of a single machine which undergoes a block-type preventive maintenance periodically and is completely repaired at each random failure. These numerical results show the efficiency of our proposed method based on fuzzy logic compared with classical logic.