A Condition-Based Maintenance Policy for a Serial Flow Line with Multiple Intermediate Buffers

This paper investigates the maintenance policies of serial flow lines with three workstations and two intermediate buffers, in which workstation processing times, transition times, and repair times are all assumed to be exponentially distributed with different mean values. The exact steady state analysis method based on the Markovian properties of the system state is employed to appraise the performance of the proposed maintenance policy. An algorithm is developed to generate transition matrix for the system state space that consists of the state space of workstations and inventory of buffers. Different from existing maintenance policies, the policy developed in this paper considers current workstation state and adjacent buffer inventory levels simultaneously. In the numerical study, the performance of different maintenance strategy structures is investigated.