Joint Prescriptive Maintenance and Production Planning and Control Process Simulation for Extrusion System

Production planning and control (PPC) is the mainstay of every manufacturer and ensures flawless production processes. However, PPC is jeopardized by breakdowns that can only be tackled with appropriate maintenance. In the past, static strategies, such as reactive and scheduled maintenance, have been used. Yet, with growing system complexity, Industry 4.0, and abundant sensor data, dynamic strategies through PHM have emerged. The most advanced maintenance strategy is prescriptive maintenance (PxM), which allows manufacturers not only to predict failures but also to establish condition-based production plans and controls. To this end, our study explores the integration of PxM with PPC. First, we propose a fault prediction model based on health indicators and future loads of a single-machine system. The proposed fault prediction is integrated into a joint PxM and PPC simulation model that compares the makespan of three joint PxM and PPC strategies inter se and versus reactive and scheduled maintenance. A simulation study using industrial data from an extrusion process evaluates the different strategies across different time horizons (one month to a year). The findings indicate that joint PxM and PPC outperform other strategies, providing significant time savings over traditional methods. Further, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to assess the robustness of the PxM strategies under varying levels of measurement noise, revealing potential challenges under high noise conditions. The study contributes to the field of PHM by providing insights into the effectiveness of joint PxM and PPC strategies and offering a comprehensive analysis of their performance under different conditions.