Discovery of hidden maintenance opportunities in automotive assembly lines: MOW and GMOW

Abstract

In manufacturing systems, many maintenance tasks require equipment to be locked out for safety. However, such stoppage might directly cause short-term production losses although maintenance is performed to increase the long-term system reliability. In this paper, we investigate how long we can strategically stop equipment for maintenance during production operating without affecting system throughput. We extend the concept of maintenance opportunity windows (MOWs) to various system configurations and introduce a new concept of group maintenance opportunity windows (GMOWs). GMOW is the maximum time window that allows to perform a group maintenance without jeopardizing the flow of a production line. Moreover, we also provide how to calculate MOW and GMOW via simulations which can deal with uncertainties in production lines, such as random machine failures, starvations, blockages, etc.