Integrated planning of production and maintenance for imperfect system with subcontracting strategies

The purpose of this article is to deal with subcontracting strategies in the context of production, maintenance and quality integration. We study the multi-item capacitated lot-sizing problem for a production system composed of a single machine. The production system is considered imperfect, producing both conforming and non-conforming items. However, the deterioration of the system is a function of the time and production rate, which affects the quality of the manufactured items. Consequently, a quality control strategy is established, the aim is to inspect, adjust and control the manufactured items. To solve our problem, an evolutive optimization approach is proposed, namely the genetic algorithm (GA). Then, in order to adjust the parameters of GA, we use the Taguchi method. This article is one of the few documents dealing with integrated production management, maintenance and quality under subcontracting constraints that takes into account the complex aspect of the multi-item manufacturing industry. Then, a sensitivity analysis is also carried out to illustrate the robustness of the proposed control policy. Finally, we compare our results with the literature to validate our approach and highlight the advantage of subcontracting in minimizing costs.