An evaluation of maintenance policies for flexible manufacturing systems - A case study

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.