Short-term decision support system for maintenance task prioritization

Maintenance operations have a direct influence on production performance in manufacturing systems. Short-term production analysis is imperative to enable manufacturing operations to optimally respond to dynamic changes in the system behavior. However, most of the conventional decision support systems for production and maintenance focus on long-term statistic analysis, which is usually not applicable to a short-term period. Maintenance task prioritization is crucial and important for short-term analysis to reduce unnecessary or improper maintenance activities, especially when availability of maintenance resources is limited. The existing methods for maintenance priority assignment are often through heuristic methods or experience, which could cause unscheduled downtime and production losses. In this paper, a short-term decision support system for maintenance task prioritization based on the system operating conditions is introduced. The impact factor for priority assignment is obtained theoretically. A case study based on the simulation of an automotive assembly line illustrates that the proposed short-term system improves the system performance with a lower cost than the long-term method. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.