Digital twin-driven decision support system for opportunistic preventive maintenance scheduling in manufacturing

Preventive maintenance interventions are scheduled in industrial systems to prevent machine failures and breakdowns, which are associated with the incurrence of repair, unavailability, and quality-related costs. The execution of such interventions, however, generally represents a penalty to a manufacturing system’s production throughput due to machine interruption requirements. By the use of a digital twin architecture, we develop a decision support system to schedule preventive maintenance interventions with the aim of minimizing production throughout penalties via the exploitation of real-time opportunities such as supply shortages, momentary machine idleness or machine breakdowns. The decision support system has its application demonstrated by a case in a furniture manufacturer in the State of Santa Catarina – Brazil.