Modeling and Optimization of Joint Condition Based Quality/Maintenance Strategy for an Additive Manufacturing Equipment

In industrial plants, operations management encompasses three main functions: quality management, production scheduling, and maintenance planning. While these functions are interconnected in reality, they are often treated separately in practice. However, it is widely recognized that handling these parameters in isolation can lead to suboptimal solutions. To address this issue, this paper proposes an integrated approach for jointly controlling production, quality, and maintenance in the context of additive manufacturing. Specifically, we focus on an Additive Manufacturing Equipment that produces a single type of product and undergoes a degradation process, resulting in the production of non-conforming units. To make informed decisions regarding the maintenance plan, inspections are conducted to monitor product quality and machine degradation. Our strategy involves establishing a relationship between the state of the quality indicator and the level of machine degradation, thereby studying their collective impact on the maintenance plan. The objective is to minimize the average total cost per unit of time, taking into account maintenance costs, quality-related costs, and production costs. To achieve this, we develop a mathematical model and provide a numerical example to calculate optimal values for the decision variables. The proposed approach is applied to address the maintenance planning challenge for 3D printer machines.