Maintenance policies for a production system with constrained production rate and buffer capacity

This paper considers the maintenance policies for a production system constrained by its production rate and buffer capacity to cope with unexpected failures and to deal with the variability of demand and production lead times. Using a system dynamics model, we characterize, simulate and compare results obtained by applying several maintenance policies – corrective, age-based maintenance, age and buffer-based maintenance, and modified age and buffer-based maintenance – to the system. This comparison is performed assuming that optimal values of the model parameters involved in the design of each maintenance policy have already been found by using the modified Powell method. We compare and discuss the benefits of different optimization criteria in the maintenance decision making process for a production system with constrained production rate and buffer capacity.