Joint determinination of preventive maintenance and safety stocks in an unreliable production environment

In this article the authors formulate an analytical model of preventive maintenance and safety stock strategies in a production environment subject to random machine breakdowns. Traditionally, preventive maintenance and safety stocks have been independnetly studied as two separate strategies for coping with machine breakdowns. The present intent is to develop a unified framework so that the two are jointly considered. The authors illustrate the trade-offp between investing in the two options. In addition, they provide optimality conditions under which either one or both cases with deterministic and exponential repair time distributions are analyzed in detail. The authors include numerical examples to illustrate the determiniation of optimal strategies for preventive maintenance and safety stocks.