Proactive preventive maintenance policy for buffered serial production systems based on energy saving opportunistic windows

Nowadays the manufacturing enterprises are driven towards significant energy improvements by increasing energy costs and sustainability awareness, and energy consumption and energy efficiency are taking a more and more dominating position in the decision-making process of manufacturing enterprises. However, in the process of production, existing researches rarely integrate energy management with conducting preventive maintenance at the strategic level, ignoring energy-saving opportunities that may arise during machines' downtime. This paper considers a serial production system with intermediate finite buffers. Based on the concept of energy-saving opportunity window and the modelling of the continuous deterioration process of each machine, the window of energy-saving opportunity of the production system is regarded as a window of opportunity for the preventive maintenance, thus a proactive preventive maintenance strategy is proposed. The serial production system is modeled and the impact of different maintenance thresholds on the energy efficiency is explored by means of Monte Carlo simulation. For purpose of maximizing the energy efficiency of the entire production system, an iterative algorithm for solving the optimal preventive maintenance thresholds is presented as well. The numerical analysis with other maintenance strategies shows that the proposed strategy is more competitive in improving the effective throughput while reducing the overall energy consumption. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.