Reliability-oriented design of integrated model of preventive maintenance and quality control policy with time-between-events control chart

Superior manufacturing quality is prerequisite to continuously produce reliable products, and the proactive product reliability assurance is always a crucial routine task for manufacturing. Therefore, this paper presents a reliability-oriented optimization model for joint preventive maintenance (PM) and process quality control with time-between-events (TBE) control chart, where the impact of manufacturing process on product final reliability is considered to reduce the product reliability degradation originating from latent manufacturing defects. Firstly, as the foundation of reliability-oriented control, the product reliability degradation mechanism in manufacturing stage is analyzed, and the process variations of product critical-to-reliability characteristics and internal defects are considered to model the product actual reliability. On this basis, periodical PM and TBE chart are jointly applied to enhance machine performance and improve manufacturing process quality to reduce potential reliability degradation, and a three-scenario model is proposed. Then, to evaluate the performance of the integrated model, the occurrence probability, expected reliability degradation, average operational cost, and cycle time of each scenario are analyzed, and the joint policy is optimized to minimize the expected reliability degradation of batch products within a limited cost range. Finally, a case study is presented to verify the performance of the developed model by comparing it with a pure planned maintenance policy, and a sensitivity analysis is conducted to analyze the impacts of model parameters.