Opportunistic maintenance based on multi-dependent components of manufacturing system

Manufacturing systems operate under high production, reliability and safety requirements due to the complicated technology involved and hazardous consequences for product/process in case of failures. In that way, Maintenance plays a key role to sustain the system within its nominal operation space. It consists in implementing strategies to control optimally the Key Performance Indicators of the system mainly in production phase. To improve this optimality, opportunistic maintenance gives the maintenance staff an opportunity to replace or repair those items, which are found to be defective or needs replacement in the immediate future, during the maintenance of another machine or component. However, for this new strategy, all components are usually assumed to be independent. This assumption is not relevant since different kinds of dependencies exist really between them. So, to face with this issue, it is proposed in the paper an innovative opportunistic maintenance approach considering both economic and structural dependence and leading to an efficient maintenance plan synchronized with production. The interest of this approach is illustrated on a part of an assembly system. (C) 2016 CIRP.