Simulation‐based approach to joint production and preventive maintenance scheduling on a failure‐prone machine

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to propose and model an integrated production‐maintenance strategy for a failure‐prone machine in a just‐in‐time context.Design/methodology/approach – The proposed integrated policy is defined and a simulation model is developed to investigate it.Findings – The paper focuses on finding simultaneously two decision variables: the period (T) at which preventive maintenance actions have to be performed; and the sequence of jobs (S). These values minimize the maintenance costs (MC) and the expected total earliness and tardiness costs (ETC) away from a common due‐date D.Practical implications – The paper attempts to integrate in a single model the two main aspects of any manufacturing and production systems: production and maintenance. It focuses on a stochastic scheduling problem in which n immediately available jobs are to be scheduled jointly with the preventive maintenance. The effect of the period (T) and the sequence of job (S) on the expected total cost are shown th...