Modeling the influence of technician proficiency and maintenance strategies on production system performance

Abstract

Maintenance tasks will be the latest automated part of a manufacturing system. Thus, the technician proficiency impacts manufacturing performance. We studied the influence of maintenance proficiency on both machine availability and manufacturing cycle times under three different maintenance strategies: run-to-failure (RTF), preventive maintenance (PM), and condition-based maintenance (CBM). To discuss scenarios in the same framework, we modeled a health-index based phase-type model and a probability model for imperfect maintenance being subject to technician proficiency. Finally, we simulated a single machine queueing model with different technician proficiency and maintenance strategies. The simulation results revealed that CBM could resist lower proficiency and keep higher availability and low manufacturing cycle times than RTF and PM.