Integrating Maintenance Planning and Production Scheduling: Making Operational Decisions with a Strategic Perspective

In today's competitive environment, the importance of continuous production, quality improvement, and fast delivery has forced production and delivery processes to become highly reliable. Keeping equipment in good condition through maintenance activities can ensure a more reliable system. However, maintenance leads to temporary reduction in capacity that could otherwise be utilized for production. Therefore, the coordination of maintenance and production is important to guarantee good system performance. The central thesis of this dissertation is that integrating maintenance and production decisions increases efficiency by ensuring high quality production, effective resource utilization, and on-time deliveries. Firstly, we study the problem of integrated maintenance and production planning where machines are preventively maintained in the context of a periodic review production system with uncertain yield. Our goal is to provide insight into the optimal maintenance policy, increasing the number of finished products. Specifically, we prove the conditions that guarantee the optimal maintenance policy has a threshold type. Secondly, we address the problem of integrated maintenance planning and production scheduling where machines are correctively maintained in the context of a dynamic aircraft repair shop. To solve the problem, we view the dynamic repair shop as successive static repair scheduling sub-problems over shorter periods. Our results show that the approach that uses logic-based Benders decomposition to solve the static sub-problems, schedules over longer horizon, and quickly adjusts the schedule increases the utilization of aircraft in the long term. Finally, we tackle the problem of integrated maintenance planning and production scheduling where machines are preventively maintained in the context of a multi-machine production system. Depending on the deterioration process of machines, we design decomposed techniques that deal with the stochastic and combinatorial challenges in different, coupled stages. Our results demonstrate that the integrated approaches decrease the total maintenance and lost production cost, maximizing the on-time deliveries. We also prove sufficient conditions that guarantee the monotonicity of the optimal maintenance policy in both machine state and the number of customer orders. Within these three contexts, this dissertation demonstrates that the integrated maintenance and production decision-making increases the process efficiency to produce high quality products in a timely manner.

Keywords: Scheduling
Maintenance Optimization
Production Planning
Decomposition
Logic-based Benders Decomposition
Repair Shop Scheduling
Dynamic Scheduling
Constraint Programming
Random Yield
Periodic Review Production System
Rescheduling
Mixed Integer Programming
Integrated Maintenance and Production Scheduling
Integration of Short-term and Long-term Challenges
Machine Deterioration
Flowshop Scheduling
Markov Decision Process
Threshold Maintenance Policy
Integrated Maintenance and Production Planning
Hybrid Optimization
Minimizing the Number of Tardy Jobs
Maintenance Capacity Limit
Stochastic Reasoning combined by Combinatorial Challenges
Decomposed, but Coupled Algorithms
Yield Management
Advisor: Beck, J. Christopher