Study of dynamic workload assignment strategies on production performance

Abstract As maintenance has grown to be seen as a prospective tool for production value generation and business performance improvement, it can no longer be considered as isolated from other production activities. Studies have shown that the degradation process of machines is dependent on the operation being performed (e.g., higher workload results in faster degradation). However, the decision-making in maintenance planning with dynamic operation/workload adjustment considerations has not been addressed until recently. Moreover, the existing approaches attempting to tackle this problem have overlooked the fact that dynamics exist in both external production environment and internal production conditions and thus prove to be inefficient to react to unexpected situations arising. This paper has explored the impacts of different workload adjustment strategies on system production performance by a numerical study using agent-based simulation. A detailed discussion is given on the implication of the simulation outcome, based on which some insights into potential future work are also presented.