A maintenance model for the supply-buffer-demand production system

Maintenance means repairing an engineering system when it fails to perform normally, including operations to keep the system in good operating status and to prevent the system from deteriorating. As deterioration is inevitable in engineering systems, maintenance measures are always necessary and crucial in ensuring the performances of the systems in their lifecycle. Accordingly, there are many research works focusing on this topic, with many papers published. In this paper, we study the problem of designing an optimal maintenance scheme on the Supply-Buffer-Demand (SBD) production system, with two production machines connected by a buffer stock. Specifically, our model is developed through extending previous work by Chelbi and Rezg (2006), relaxing its assumption on preventive maintenance from perfect maintenance to imperfect. Also, the additional availability and reliability requirements for the system are considered. Analytical analysis and numerical algorithm for this optimization model are presented, with an example shown for the purpose of illustration. ©2009 IEEE.