Product quality oriented predictive maintenance strategy for manufacturing systems

Maintenance, production and quality are strongly linked to each other. Predictive maintenance is an effective way to eliminate the potential failures and ensure the stable operation of the manufacturing system, and further improve the reliability of the manufacturing system and the quality of manufactured products. Regarding the intelligent manufacturing philosophy “prediction and manufacturing#x201D;, a novel predictive maintenance strategy is proposed, in which the product quality control is integrated into predictive maintenance decision-making. First, the key process variables that characterize equipment wear are identified and integrated into the modeling of the equipment failure rate. Second, quality deviation that characterizes product quality level is defined based on co-effect between manufacturing system component reliability and product quality (i.e., Q-R chain). Third, the optimal maintenance strategy is obtained by optimizing the quality cost, maintenance cost, and interruption cost simultaneously. Finally, a case study on the predictive maintenance strategy decision-making for a cylinder head manufacturing system is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The final result shows that the proposed method can achieve a superior economic performance relative to the conventional preventive maintenance mode.