Analysis of maintenance policies supported by simulation in a flexible manufacturing cell

The purpose of this article is to analyze three maintenance policies in a flexible manufacturing cell from a mechanical manufacturing company. The policies were opportunistic maintenance, in which all the machines are repaired whenever the cell stops, corrective maintenance, in which only the failed machines are repaired whenever the cell stops, and partial corrective maintenance, in which only the failed subsystem is repaired whenever the cell stops. The research method is quantitative modeling and computer simulation. The cell is part of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) and includes two robots in parallel and a CNC machine. Previous lifetime data analysis provided reliability functions, using Weibull and exponential models. The evaluation of the policies relied on the number of repairs and the resulting MTBF of the cell. The simulation relied on twenty replications of the three policies to ground the analysis. The study concluded that the two policies, the corrective maintenance, and the partial corrective maintenance are almost equally effective. The opportunistic maintenance policy is less effective than the others. The article also calculated the systemic reliability of the cell.