Joint Maintenance and Energy Management of Sustainable Manufacturing Systems

The expenses associated with maintenance activities and energy consumption account for a large portion of the total operation cost in manufacturing plants. Therefore, effective methods that can be used for smart maintenance decision-making and energy management to reduce the costs of these two sections and improve the competitiveness of manufacturing enterprise are of high interests to industry. Many efforts focusing on maintenance decision-making and energy management have been dedicated. However, most of the existing research focusing on these two topics has been conducted separately, very little work has been done from a joint perspective that considers the benefits from both manufacturing machine reliability improvement and energy cost reduction. In this paper, a joint maintenance and energy management method is proposed to identify the maintenance actions considering energy cost as well as other equipment health metrics. A numerical case based on a section of an automotive assembly line is used to illustrate the potential benefits of the proposed approach.