Simultaneous optimization of inventory, maintenance, and quality for production systems subject to multiple mean and variance shifts

This article presents a general, integrated production, quality, and condition-based maintenance model for imperfect processes with multiple out-of-control operating states. The production system is subject to multiple quality disruptions, which affect both the process mean and variance, and failures. The quality of the production process output is monitored by a fully adaptive control scheme, and the state of deterioration is estimated through periodic sampling inspection. The proposed control scheme’s operation is modeled through a Markov chain, and the optimal quality control, maintenance, and inventory policy are defined based on an expected total cost minimization criterion. Finally, an illustrative example is employed to demonstrate the operation of the proposed model, sensitivity analysis is conducted to generate insights into how the process parameters misspecification affects the economic performance, and a comparative study is performed to evaluate the model’s superiority against the respective single quality shift model.