Maintenance policy in job-shop manufacturing systems with reminder cell

The market fluctuations can reduce drastically the performance of manufacturing systems. Among several configurations, the configuration with a reminder machine/cell in a manufacturing system has been recently studied. The remainder machine is able to perform all the manufacturing operations needed in the manufacturing system. This paper investigates the effect of a hybrid preventive/corrective maintenance policy in a manufacturing system with reminder machine. The maintenance policy proposed is a trade off between the preventive and corrective approach. A simulation environment developed by Rockwell ARENA is proposed to test the proposed approach. The maintenance policy is tested in static and very dynamic environment. The performance measures are compared to a model with pure corrective policy. The simulation results show that the proposed maintenance policy with the use of reminder machine can improve significantly the performance of manufacturing systems.