MAINTENANCE OPTIMIZATION OF A PRODUCTION SYSTEM WITH BUFFER CAPACITY

We consider a deteriorating installation, which supplies input to a su bsequent production system. The installation is provided with a buffer to cope with unexpected failures of the installation, which may cause interruptions of the production process. By preventive maintenance on the installation a further improvement of the production process can be obtained, In this paper we consider a preventive maintenance policy , which is based not only on the information about the age of the inst allation but also on the content of the subsequent buffer. For this in tegrated maintenance-production problem, we analyse a class of control limit policies which are nearly optimal and easy to implement. The an alysis is based on the embedding technique from Markov decision theory , In addition, we provide a characterization of the overall optimal po licy and report on numerical comparisons of the best control limit pol icy with the overall optimal policy and other reference policies.