Maintenance Decision Model for a Two-Machine Production Line With Multistage Degradation Machines

In this work, we develop preventative maintenance policies on two-machine-and-one-buffer production systems with machines subject to multi-stage degradation. Condition-based maintenance policies are generated for both machines, with consideration on both the machine degradation stages and the buffer level. Moreover, the policies are flexible, allowing a machine to be recovered to any better operating state, while merely recovering to the best operating state is possible in many previous work. A Markov decision model is formulated to find the optimal maintenance policy and computational experiments show that the policies improve the performance of a system in finite production runs.