Opportunistic maintenance modeling for series production systems based on bottleneck by considering energy consumption and market demand

ABSTRACT Nowadays, series production systems are broadly used in various branches of industry. In these kinds of production systems, any disruption in production flow can significantly increase production cost and time; therefore, a proper maintenance strategy considerably reduces the company’s costs and enhance organizational performance. In this research, a novel bottleneck-centered opportunistic maintenance policy for a series production line is proposed. First of all, the bottleneck is detected by the Lowest Production Rate method. Then, preventive maintenance time interval, reliability threshold, and number of maintenance cycles are determined by the particle swarm optimization algorithm. Finally, a novel opportunistic maintenance strategy is proposed based on analyzing the cost savings of preventive maintenance advancement and postponement. To demonstrate the model’s effectiveness, the proposed bottleneck-based opportunistic maintenance model is compared with two other maintenance models, and the results confirmed that the proposed strategy could efficiently eliminate unnecessary production breaks and achieve cost reduction. Graphical abstract