Integrated Quality and Production Logistics Analysis of Asynchronous Manufacturing Lines With Deteriorating Machines Monitored by SPC.

Quality, maintenance and production logistics aspects have been traditionally treated by scientist and industrialists almost in isolation, i.e. with relative attention to their mutual relation. However, recent works show that a strong relation between equipment availability, product quality and system productivity do exist. This paper presents for the first time a general decomposition method able to study the integrated quality and production logistics performance of production systems where machines are subject to progressive deterioration states. The partially observable degrading process is considered to be monitored by statistical control charts that may activate preventive maintenance procedures. The proposed method is based on a completely new idea of decomposition approach that applies to general multiple-up and multiple-down state machines. The development of such integrated performance evaluation framework paves the way to the development of a coupled evaluation / optimization procedure to jointly determine the cost optimal design of quality control tools, maintenance policies and production system parameters.