Effect of maintenance resource constraints on flow-shop environment in a joint production and maintenance context

Production and maintenance planning decisions for any manufacturing industry are very crucial to make shop floor operations effective. Despite the dependencies, these policies are often considered and optimized independently in literature and practice. Recently, researchers have started focusing more on integrating these policy options. However, the effect of maintenance resource constraints during such consideration is missing in the literature. The present paper investigates the effect of spare parts and maintenance technician's unavailability on joint production and maintenance planning decisions for flow-shop environment. The performance measures considered here are makespan, total production cost and system utilization. Simulation-based optimization techniques are used to obtain the optimal production and maintenance plan. Different cases of spare parts lead times and maintenance technician's unavailability are considered for investigation. For each case production and maintenance planning decisions are analyzed. It is found that spare parts and maintenance technician's unavailability have a significant impact on production performance.