A dynamic grouping maintenance strategy for geographically dispersed production systems

This paper presents a dynamic grouping maintenance strategy for geographically dispersed production systems (GDPS). Economic dependence at both component and site levels is investigated and integrated in the grouping model. The grouping and routing optimization become then a NP-hard problem which is herein solved by the joint implementation of Genetic algorithm (GA) and Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) approach. The uses and advantages of the proposed grouping maintenance approach is illustrated through a numerical example of a GDPS consisting of 12 components located in four different sites.