An evaluation of maintenance policies for flexible manufacturing systems

This paper presents the results of a case/simulation study that evaluated a number of potential maintenance policies for a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). Empirical data were used to structure the operation of the FMS, and to simulate its failures and repairs on the shop floor. Five maintenance policies – corrective, 30-day preventive, 90-day preventive, on-failure opportunistic, and 30-day opportunistic – were compared on four performance criteria: equipment utilization, machine downtime, through-put, and average flow time. The ‘30-day opportunistic’ policy performed best overall, although the ‘corrective’ policy was a close second, outperformed only in the area of equipment utilization. The ‘on-failure opportunistic’ policy performed poorly on every measure of system performance.