Production/maintenance control of multiple-product manufacturing system

This paper presents a method to find the optimal production rate and preventive maintenance policies for a multiple-product manufacturing system. The manufacturing system under consideration consists of one machine which produces several products in order to satisfy randomly demands corresponding to every product. The machine is subject to random failures. A preventive maintenance action is considered in order to improve the reliability of the machine, thereby reducing the amount of degradation caused by machine failures. The decision variables are the production rate, the sub-periods of production and the preventive maintenance rate. The objective of the study is to find the decision variables that minimize the overall cost, including production, preventive maintenance and inventory holding costs over a finite planning horizon. A numerical example is given to illustrate the proposed model.