Optimal production and maintenance decisions when a system experiences age-dependent deterioration

Consider a production process whose performance deteriorates over time. It is assumed that the process performance can be measured in terms of the proportion of ‘good’ (non-defective) units of end items produced. Preventive maintenance may be applied to the process to slow down the rate of decline of (or improve) the process performance. This paper incorporates a dynamic maintenance problem into a production control model and proposes a simultaneous determination of optimal production and maintenance policies. It focuses on the study of possible trade-offs between the cost (level) of preventive maintenance applied to the process and the output of the production process.