Reassessing tradeoffs inherent to simultaneous maintenance and production planning

Abstract

Previous work has considered the simultaneous (as opposed to sequential) optimization of a maintenance policy and a production policy in a multi-product setting with random yield and product mix constraints. One of the sequential approaches to which the simultaneous approach is compared is a so-called first-come-first-served (FCFS) approach, i.e., an approach that generates randomized production policies that do not depend on the deterioration state of the machine. However, the model formulation for this approach does not generate policies consistent with this FCFS notion. Therefore, we present a revised FCFS model and analyze its performance using an existing experimental design. The results suggest that previous work overestimates the degree to which a FCFS approach is suboptimal, and underestimates the value of simultaneously optimizing the maintenance and production decisions. Lastly, we conduct additional experiments which suggest that the joint impact of using both simultaneous optimization and a deterioration dependent production policy is quite significant. © 2011 Production and Operations Management Society.