Joint production, inspection and maintenance control policies for deteriorating system under quality constraint

This paper studies the integration of production, sampling inspection and age-based maintenance planning for anunreliable production system subject to gradual deterioration. The deterioration process of the production unit has a twofold effect on its reliability and product quality. To mitigate the effects of such deterioration, an agebasedmajor maintenance can be conducted, which denotes a perfect repair that restores the production unit to initial conditions. The quality control is performed through a sampling plan that inspects a fraction of the partsproduced. The problem further considers that the optimal decision must be determined under a constraint on theoutgoing quality required by the final customer. In this domain, standard sampling procedures are applicableonly to production process that are statistically stable and under control. Nevertheless, such sampling plansdisregard the interaction with production management and maintenance issues and they do not consider theeffects of deterioration. In this paper a new joint control policy considering the interactions between productionqualityand maintenance is proposed. A stochastic mathematical model is developed through specialized optimizationtechniques to solve such quality constrained problem. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate theusefulness of the proposed approach and to study the interactions between production-quality and maintenancestrategies. An extensive sensitivity analysis and a comparative study are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the obtained joint control policy.