Optimal preventive maintenance of a production system with an intermediate buffer

In this paper we consider a model consisting of a deteriorating installation that transfers a raw material to a production unit and a buffer which has been built between the installation and the production unit. The deterioration process of the installation is considered to be nonstationary, i.e. the transition probabilities may depend not only on the working conditions of the installation but on its age as well. The problem of the optimal preventive maintenance of the installation is considered. Under a suitable cost structure it is shown that, for fixed age of the installation and fixed buffer level, the optimal policy is of control-limit type. When the deterioration process is stationary, an efficient Markov decision algorithm operating on the class of control-limit policies is developed. There is strong numerical evidence that the algorithm converges to the optimal policy. Two generalizations of this model are also discussed.     

Optimal production time and number of maintenance actions for an imperfect production system under equal-interval maintenance policy

This paper deals with the optimal production/maintenance (PM) policy for a deteriorating production system which may shift from the in-control state to the out-of-control state while producing items. The process is assumed to have a general shift distribution. Under the commonly used maintenance policy, equal-interval maintenance, the joint optimizations of the PM policy are derived such that the expected total cost per unit time is minimized. Different conditions for optimality, lower and upper bounds and uniqueness properties on the optimal PM policy are provided. The implications of another commonly used policy, to perform a maintenance action only at the end of the production run, are also discussed. Structural properties for the optimal policy are established so that an efficient solution procedure is obtained. In the exponential case, some extensions of the results obtained previously in the literature are presented. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the solution procedure for the optimal production and maintenance policy.     

Optimum policy for a production system with major repair and preventive maintenance

This study applies periodic preventive maintenance (PM) to a repairable production system with major repairs conducted after a failure. This study considers failed PM due to maintenance workers incorrectly performing PM and damages occurring after PM. Therefore, three PM types are considered: imperfect PM, perfect PM and failed PM. Imperfect PM has the same failure rate as that before PM, whereas perfect PM makes restores the system perfectly. Failed PM results in system deterioration and major repairs are required. The probability that PM is perfect or failed depends on the number of imperfect maintenance operations conducted since the previous renewal cycle. Mathematical formulas for expected total production cost per unit time are generated. Optimum PM time that minimizes cost is derived. Various special cases are considered, including the maintenance learning effect. A numerical example is given.     

Contribution of simulation to the optimization of maintenance strategies for a randomly failing production system

This paper compares two strategies for operating a production system composed of two machines working in parallel and a downstream inventory supplying an assembly line. The two machines, which are prone to random failures, undergo preventive and corrective maintenance operations. These operations with a random duration make the machines unavailable. Moreover, during regular subcontracting operations, one of these machines becomes unavailable to supply the downstream inventory. In the first strategy it is assumed that the periodicity of preventive maintenance operations and the production rate of each machine are independent. The second strategy suggests an interaction between the periods of unavailability and the production rates of the two machines in order to minimize production losses during these periods. A simulation model for each strategy is developed so as to be able to compare them and to simultaneously determine the timing of preventive maintenance on each machine considering the total average cost per time unit as the performance criterion. The second strategy is then considered, and a multi-criteria analysis is adopted to reach the best cost-availability compromise.     

Two-stage production scheduling with an outsourcing option

This paper considers a two-stage production scheduling problem in which each activity requires two operations to be processed in stages 1 and 2, respectively. There are two options for processing each operation: the first is to produce it by utilizing in-house resources, while the second is to outsource it to a subcontractor. For in-house operations, a schedule is constructed and its performance is measured by the makespan, that is, the latest completion time of operations processed in-house. Operations by subcontractors are instantaneous but require outsourcing cost. The objective is to minimize the weighted sum of the makespan and the total outsourcing cost. This paper analyzes how the model’s computational complexity changes according to unit outsourcing costs in both stages and describes the boundary between NP-hard and polynomially solvable cases. Finally, this paper presents an approximation algorithm for one NP-hard case.     

Chaos in a generalized Lorenz system

A three-component dynamic system describing a quantum cavity electrodynamic device with a pumping and nonlinear dissipation is studied. Various dynamical regimes are investigated in terms of divergent trajectories approaches and fractal statistics. It has been shown that stable and unstable dissipative structures type of limit cycles can be formed in such system, with variation of pumping and nonlinear dissipation rates. Transitions to chaotic regime and the corresponding chaotic attractor are studied in detail.     

Multi-solitons for a generalized Davey-Stewartson system

This paper studies multi-solitons of non-integrable generalized Davey-Stewartson system in the elliptic-elliptic case. By extending the method for constructing multi-solitons of non-integrable nonlinear Schr¨odinger equations and systems developed by Martel et al. to the present non-integrable generalized DaveyStewartson system and overcoming some new difficulties caused by the nonlocal operator B, we prove the existence of multi-solitons for this system. Furthermore, we also give a generalization of this result to a more general class of equations with nonlocal nonlinearities.     

A numerical method to approximate optimal production and maintenance plan in a flexible manufacturing system

The simultaneous planning of the production and the maintenance in a flexible manufacturing system is considered in this paper. The manufacturing system is composed of one machine that produces a single product. There is a preventive maintenance plan to reduce the failure rate of the machine. This paper is different from the previous researches in this area in two separate ways. First, the failure rate of the machine is supposed to be a function of its age. Second, we assume that the demand of the manufacturing product is time dependent and its rate depends on the level of advertisement on that product. The objective is to maximize the expected discounted total profit of the firm over an infinite time horizon. In the process of finding a solution to the problem, we first characterize an optimal control by introducing a set of Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman partial differential equations. Then we realize that under practical assumptions, this set of equations can not be solved analytically. Thus to find a suboptimal control, we approximate the original stochastic optimal control model by a discrete-time deterministic optimal control problem. Then proposing a numerical method to solve the steady state Riccati equation, we approximate a suboptimal solution to the problem.     

Efficiency consideration of generalized age replacement policy

Under the generalized age replacement policy, the system is replaced either at the predetermined age or upon failure if its corresponding repair time exceeds the threshold, whichever comes first. In this paper, we investigate the optimal choice of the pre‐determined preventive replacement age for a nonwarranted system, which minimizes the expected cost rate during the life cycle of the system from the customer's perspective under certain cost structures. Furthermore, we discuss several properties of such a generalized age replacement policy in comparison with the traditional age replacement policy. An efficiency, which represents the fractional time that the system is on, is defined under the proposed generalized age replacement policy and its monotonicity properties are investigated as well. The main objective of this study is to investigate the advantageous features of the generalized age replacement policy over the traditional age replacement policy with regard to the availability of the repairable system. Assuming that the system deteriorates with age, we illustrate our proposed optimal policies numerically and observe the impact of relevant parameters on the optimal preventive replacement age.     

Integrated production and maintenance planning for parallel machine system considering cost of rejection

Production scheduling and maintenance planning have interdependencies but been often considered and optimized independently in practice and in the literature. Furthermore, product quality has direct relationship with maintenance planning. This paper proposes an integrated approach for production scheduling and maintenance planning for parallel machine system considering the effect of cost of rejection. The approach aims to determine optimal production schedule and maintenance plan such that overall operations cost is minimized. A simulation-based optimization approach is used to solve the problem. A numerical investigation is performed to illustrate the approach. The integrated approach shows between 0.6 and 35.8% improvement in term of overall operations cost over independent approach for various scenarios. The results indicate that simultaneous consideration of production scheduling and maintenance planning results into better system performance.     

On the optimality of a maintenance queueing system

We consider a finite single-server maintenance queue with multiple types of customers. The difference between customers' types is defined by the offered rewards. We show that the optimal admission control policy for maximizing the long-run average reward per unit time has a trunk reservation structure. Meanwhile, if the equipment is off, there exists a threshold of the queue length, above which the optimal repair speed is increasing in the queue length and below which the optimal repair speed is 0.     

A delay-time-based maintenance model of a multi-component system

There is a well established literature on delay-time modelsof regular inspection policies where inspections may or maynotbe perfect, and where the initial point u of a defect arisesas a homogeneous Poisson process. This paper extends the modellingin two ways. The first is to include the observed practice wherethe multi-component system is inspected not only on a plannedbasis, but also when a component fails. The second extensionis to use a nonhomogeneous Poisson process to describe defectarrivals in the system. An inspection–replacement modelbased upon these two extensions is then developed for a multi-componentsystem. The total expected cost per unit time is minimized withrespect to theinspection intervals and the system replacementtime. The likelihood function of the time of failures and thenumber of defects found at inspections is established, in orderto estimate model parameters based upon routinely collectedmaintenance data. As a special case of the general model, aninspection model—based upon a homogeneous Poisson processof defects arising—is also proposed, which has a relativelysimple structure. Both simulated and real-life data of failuresand defects identified at inspections are used to test the modelsand parameter-estimating procedure.     

Numerical treatment of a generalized Vandermonde system of equations

A stable method is proposed for the numerical solution of a linear system of equations having a generalized Vandermonde matrix. The method is based on Gaussian elimination and establishes explicit expressions for the elements of the resulting upper triangular matrix. These elements can be computed by means of sums of exclusively positive terms. In an important special case these sums can be reduced to simple recursions. Finally the method is retraced for the case of a confluent type of generalized Vandermonde matrix.     

Global solution to a generalized nonisothermal Ginzburg-Landau system

The article deals with a nonlinear generalized Ginzburg-Landau (Allen-Cahn) system of PDEs accounting for nonisothermal phase transition phenomena which was recently derived by A. Miranville and G. Schimperna: Nonisothermal phase separation based on a microforce balance, Discrete Contin. Dyn. Syst., Ser. B, 5 (2005), 753–768. The existence of solutions to a related Neumann-Robin problem is established in an N ⩽ 3- dimensional space setting. A fixed point procedure guarantees the existence of solutions locally in time. Next, Sobolev embeddings, interpolation inequalities, Moser iterations estimates and results on renormalized solutions for a parabolic equation with L ¹ data are used to handle a suitable a priori estimate which allows to extend our local solutions to the whole time interval. The uniqueness result is justified by proper contracting estimates.     

On maintenance scheduling of production units

A typical maintenance scheduling problem is presented as a large-scale mixed integer nonlinear programming case. Several relaxations of the conditions of variables and constraints are discussed. The optimal solution of the models based on these relaxations is viewed as the lower bound of the optimal solution in the original problem. A combined implicit enumeration and branch-and-bound algorithm is used. Typical dimension of the problems for which computational experience is reported is 25 production units in the system. 19 of these are to be maintained and a planning horizon of 52 weeks with 5 types of hours per week. The corresponding dimensions of the model are about 5700 constraints, 700 binary variables and 6500 nonlinear separable variables.     

Positive solutions for a system of generalized Lidstone problems

In this paper, we study the existence and multiplicity of positive solutions for the system of the generalized Lidstone problems We use fixed point index theory to establish our main results based on a priori estimates achieved by utilizing some properties of concave functions, so that the nonlinearities f and g are allowed to grow in distinct manners, with one of them growing superlinearly and the other growing sublinearly.     

Explicit generalized solutions to a system of conservation laws

This paper studies a special 3 by 3 system of conservation laws which cannot be solved in the classical distributional sense. By adding a viscosity term and writing the system in the form of a matrix Burgers equation an explicit formula is found for the solution of the pure initial value problem. These regularized solutions are used to construct solutions for the conservation laws with initial conditions, in the algebra of generalized functions of Colombeau. Special cases of this system were studied previously by many authors.