Maintenance policy structure investigation and optimisation of a complex production system with intermediate buffers

Existing research about the maintenance optimisation of production systems with intermediate buffers largely assumed a series system structure. However, practical production systems often contain subsystems of ring structures, for example, rework and feedforward. The maintenance optimisation of these complex systems is difficult due to the complicated structure of maintenance policies and the large search space for optimisation. This paper proves the control limit property of the optimal condition-based maintenance policy. Based on the control limit property, approximate policy structures that incur a smaller policy space are proposed. Because the state space of a production system is often large, the objective function of the maintenance optimisation cannot be evaluated analytically. Consequently, a stochastic branch and bound (SB&B) algorithm embedding a sequential simulation procedure is proposed to determine a cost-efficient condition-based maintenance policy. Numerical studies show that the proposed maintenance policy structures can deliver a cost-efficient maintenance policy, and the performance of the SB&B algorithm is enhanced by the inclusion of a sequential simulation procedure.