A sensor-driven operations and maintenance planning approach for large-scale leased manufacturing systems

The rise of mass customisation drives manufacturers to adopt leasing agreements for their machinery rather than outright their ownership. This industrial trend results in large-scale leased manufacturing systems, where the asset conditions and maintenance requirements for a fleet of machines and/or production lines from several manufacturers are continuously monitored and managed by a lessor. In this paper, we propose an operations and maintenance planning model that explicitly models (i) dynamic real-time failure rate predictions for machines based on sensor-driven degradation data, (ii) optimal routes for maintenance teams across a number of geographically-distributed manufacturing sites, and (iii) operational outcomes. The model can handle complex maintenance and operational outcome interdependencies between multiple machines, and incorporate demand for different products, heterogeneous machine capacities and capabilities, factory topology, and the resulting production flow capacities of products. To demonstrate the model’s practicality, it is applied to three experimental case studies with various numbers of machines, operating schedules, product types, and flow capacities. The results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the traditional reliability-based maintenance model in key metrics such as the number of unexpected failures, the cost of preventive maintenance actions, machine downtime, the percentage of unsatisfied demand, and total cost.