A study on overall line efficiency (OLE) centered production line maintenance prioritization considering equipment operational reliability

Maintenance task prioritization is essential for a production system, especially in the case of limited available resources. In this paper, the overall line efficiency (OLE), which comprehensively evaluates production line productivity and processability, is adopted as the objective to develop maintenance prioritization. An OLE centred maintenance prioritization policy is proposed, which assigns priorities according to the influences of the specific characteristics of equipment operational reliability on OLE. In order to correctly allocate limited maintenance resources to truly critical equipment and achieve good maintenance effect, equipment influences on OLE are analysed from the level of the specific performances of their operational reliability, i.e. equipment mean time between stops (mtbs), mean time to resume from stops (mttr) and buffer size N. Considering the interactions between these parameters, a surrogate model-extended Fourier amplitude sensitivity test (SM-EFAST) process is integrated to accurately and rapidly analyse the total effects of them on OLE. Finally, a case study has been carried out to verify the proposed OLE centred maintenance prioritization method, and higher OLE and lower total maintenance cost were achieved.