Optimal production and maintenance decisions when a system experience age‐dependent deterioration

Abstract Consider a production process whose performance deteriorates over time. It is assumed that the process performance can be measured in terms of the proportion of ‘good’ (non‐defective) units of end items produced. Preventive maintenance may be applied to the process to slow down the rate of decline of (or improve) the process performance. This paper incorporates a dynamic maintenance problem into a production control model and proposes a simultaneous determination of optimal production and maintenance policies. It focuses on the study of possible trade‐offs between the cost (level) of preventive maintenance applied to the process and the output of the production process.