Maintenance integration in manufacturing systems: From the modeling tool to evaluation

In manufacturing systems, wear-out and eventual failure are unavoidable. However, to reduce the rate of their occurrence and to prolong the life of equipment or the capacity for extended productive use of the equipment under the necessary technological functioning and servicing, maintenance can be performed. For large manufacturing systems, maintenance integration involves a particular development concerned with both complexity models and computing time. This paper presents an effective way of modeling complex manufacturing systems through hierarchical and modular analysis by using stochastic Petri nets and Markov chains. In the proposed approach, the integration of maintenance policies in a manufacturing system is facilitated by the development of a generic model. With this generic modeling, the user doesn't need to code the strategies but only to instantiate the generic model with the structure of the manufacturing system. This method allows various maintenance strategies to be coded in the generic model with the aim of studying their influence on system dependability and performance.