Integrated production and maintenance control policies for failure-prone manufacturing systems producing perishable products

The problem of integrated production and maintenance control of unreliable manufacturing systems evolving in a stochastic and dynamic environment is studied in this paper. The considered system is subject to degradation and the produced products are perishable with random shelf-lives. The literature of operations management for perishable products reports a correlation between the shelf-life of the product and the machine degradation. In fact, the latter results in shelf-lives reduction. Ignoring this correlation effect may result in inaccurate values of the shelf-lives and inefficient control policies. The objective of this paper is to develop a joint production and maintenance control policy that minimizes the total cost composed of backlog, inventory holding, disposal, and maintenance costs. The proposed parametrized joint control policy combines a multi hedging point policy and an age-based preventive maintenance policy. The optimization of the parameters of the proposed joint control policy is obtained using a simulation-based optimization approach and sensitivity analyses are provided to confirm its robustness. The obtained results show that the correlation between machine degradation and shelf-life reduction has a major influence on the control parameters and that preventive maintenance interventions can lead to increasing the shelf-life of products and minimizing the total cost. The proposed joint control policy is then compared to three other polices for a wide range of system and cost data. The obtained results show that the proposed joint control policy outperforms the other polices in terms of total incurred costs.