Opportunistic maintenance policy integrating leasing profit and capacity balancing for serial-parallel leased systems.

Service-oriented manufacturing promotes maintenance outsourcing as a new profit growth spot in the industry. For maximizing the leasing profits in this product-service mode, a new opportunistic maintenance policy is developed to handle the challenges of complex serial-parallel structure and multi-procedure capacity. Different from traditional maintenance strategies for a single leased machine, the serial-parallel structure of a manufacturing system is taken as the research emphasis. Meanwhile, capacity balancing is analyzed for the practical manufacturing. At the machine level, sequential predictive maintenance (PM) intervals for each machine is individually scheduled according to its health evolution. At the procedure level and the system level, a capacity balancing-oriented leasing profit optimization (CB-LPO) policy is proposed by considering the constraints of the capacity balancing to optimize real-time maintenance decisions dynamically. Finally, we present a case study by comparing the global maintenance scheme during the lease contract period. It has been verified that this CB-LPO policy has significant economic advantages and computational benefits.