A hybrid design for jointly optimizing production scheduling, control chart design and maintenance in continuous flow manufacturing

Integrating the three crucial functions of quality control, economic production quantity (EPQ) and maintenance leads to cost savings and increased efficiency for manufacturing processes. While in the literature, they have typically been studied separately. Moreover, most of the existing integration models are designed for the discrete piece-part manufacturing environment. This study, nevertheless, focuses wholly on continuous flow manufacturing (CFM), which is distinctly different from piece-part manufacturing, as the sampling unit is described in light of laboratory requirements instead of the production unit. Based on this fact, this paper proposes an integrated EPQ scheme jointly designed with control-chart design and maintenance planning for the CFM process. A developed genetic algorithm is employed to minimize the expected total production cost under constraints on the economic-statistical quality. Of the costs considered, quality-related costs are quantified via an approximate formula derived from the quality loss curve depending on Taguchi’s quality loss function. A sensitivity analysis is performed on the expected total production cost and variations in the chosen system parameter values to offer insights into the issue. Finally, a comparative investigation of the suggested model and two similar models that contributed to this field is conducted.