JIT Production Strategy and Maintenance for Quality Deteriorating Systems, Applied Sciences,

We study the optimal production planning and major maintenance scheduling for an unreliable manufacturing system. We assume that the production unit experiences progressive deterioration that negatively influences product quality. For the production policy, we extendimprove traditional threshold policies with a superior alternative, based on a just-in-time (JIT) strategy.The paper brings a new vision on the importance of implementing more effective production strategiesbased on JIT methods, instead of traditional threshold policies. When a failure occurs, the productionunit is minimally repaired, and when the major maintenance is selected, the machine is restored tobrand-new conditions. The objective of the model is to determine the simultaneous JIT productionand major maintenance strategy that minimizes the total cost. Due to the stochastic features of thesystem, a simulation-based optimization approach is proposed, which combines the descriptivecapabilities of simulation modeling with analytical models, statistical analysis, and optimizationtechniques. The results verify that the proposed simulation?optimization approach provides newand coherent results that highlight the strong influence of quality deterioration on the determinationof the control parameters. A sensitivity analysis and a comparative study are conducted to illustratethat significant cost savings could be obtained with the proposed approach