Extension of Maintenance Opportunity Windows to General Manufacturing Systems

In manufacturing systems, many maintenance tasks require equipment to be stopped in order to safely perform them. However, such tasks cannot last for a long time since the stoppage of machines might directly result in production losses. In this paper, we investigate how long we can perform maintenance during scheduled operations by strategically shutting down equipment without bringing extra production losses to the system. Using the concept of maintenance opportunity window (MOW) we calculate such time intervals with given information of manufacturing systems. MOWs are analytically derived with various system configurations. Simulations are used to deal with uncertainties in production lines such as random machine failures, starvations, blockages, etc. Moreover, the proposed MOW algorithms are demonstrated through numerical case studies.