Opportunistic Maintenance Strategy for Serial Systems With Quality and Energy Consumption Constraints

This article develops an optimal opportunity maintenance strategy for serial production systems, specifically focusing on minimizing product quality loss and equipment energy consumption caused by system degradation. The degradation processes of components follow the Gamma process. When a component deteriorates to the preventive maintenance (PM) threshold, it is restored by PM to a specific condition. Meanwhile, according to a joint maintenance threshold (JMT) that considers quality and energy consumption constraints, an opportunistic window is used to determine whether components are to be opportunistically repaired. The optimal joint maintenance threshold and PM threshold are derived under the minimal long‐run average cost. A numerical example of a machining center for processing cylindrical gear housings is investigated using parameters from established literature, and comparative studies with different maintenance policies are applied to demonstrate the superiority of the suggested strategy.