Age-based preventive maintenance with multiple printing options

In today's economic context, production systems must be readily available and machinery downtime kept to a minimum. Maintenance and spare parts inventory management play a vital role in achieving these goals, and preventive maintenance has increasingly been considered in maintenance policies. Additive manufacturing (AM) has recently been combined with preventive maintenance, and thus represents an emerging research direction. However, few studies have as yet been conducted in this research stream, and we intend to fill this gap. Our study makes three main contributions. First, we address the main limitations of two current models (i.e., assuming that no failure occurs during the replenishment lead time of the spare parts). Second, we propose a new maintenance policy that considers two printing options with different levels of reliability and unitary purchase costs. Third, we develop a decision support system (DSS) to assist managers in deciding whether to implement a preventive maintenance policy that includes AM or conventional manufacturing (CM) parts. We take an interdisciplinary approach to conducting a parametrical analysis where we consider real data on the reliability of CM and AM parts, in addition to the impact of post-processing operations and optimization routines. We find that AM-based preventive maintenance policies are favored when the MTTF and the backorder costs are low and when the failure and maintenance costs are high. These findings have been incorporated into the DSS, which provides thresholds for every parameter to guide practitioners in choosing between AM and CM parts for preventive maintenance, without requiring time-expensive calculations.