Reliability and maintenance in production control ‐ an introduction

During the last decade, total quality (TQM) has become a major issue in industry.While in the past (see list of books before 1980) quality was tested on the end product,TQM requires quality control in all the phases of the production process, includinginventory of spare parts, reliability, scheduling, due dates (JIT), etc. Consequently,there has been growing interest in the application of reliability and maintenance toproduction control in the OR literature. Several books have been written during thisdecade (see list of books in the references) covering aspects of quality and reliability.In addition, there are several journals devoted to reliability (see list of journals in thereferences). Although several international conferences have been devoted to the sub-ject(see list of conference proceedings in the references), hardly any of these booksand collective volumes are completely devoted to the interface between productioncontrol and reliability or maintenance.This volume is devoted to reliability and maintenance in production control. AsI stated in the call for papers, “we welcome submissions on the use of a wide range ofOR techniques such as linear and nonlinear programming, stochastic and dynamicprogramming, as well as simulation and heuristics applied to more complex reliabilityand maintenance problems in production control”. Consequently, this volume presentsa varied collection of papers on the subject, to serve the growing audience of academic,industrial and government persons investigating various issues of reliability and main-tenancein various systems. Naturally, the audience here is interdisciplinary: operationsresearchersymanagement scientists, statisticians, engineers, and mathematicians. Often,some are unaware of the work being carried out in the other disciplines.A brief review of the events leading up to this volume may help place it incontext. The Editor-in-Chief approached me during the EURO XIV Conference, whichtook place in Jerusalem 1995 (I was chair of the organizing committee of the confer-ence).As a result, I circulated a call for papers, together with an invitation for authorsin the field to present their papers at the 1996 IFORS meeting (Vancouver, Canada),where some of the papers in this volume were actually presented in a stream ofsessions. Overall, 43 papers were submitted; after a long refereeing process, only 19papers were included in this volume. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1999