An alert-assisted inspection policy for a production process with imperfect condition signals

Alp Akcay

European Journal of Operational Research, 2022, vol. 298, issue 2, 510-525

Abstract: We study the inspection scheduling decisions for a production process that goes through a hidden defective state before its failure. The production process is equipped with a predictive model, generating alert and no-alert signals. An alert signal indicates that production process is in the defective state, while a no-alert signal indicates it is in the healthy state. The signals are imperfect, meaning that an alert signal can be generated for a healthy process and a no-alert signal can be generated for a defective process. Only a costly inspection can detect the true condition. We introduce a new inspection policy, which generalizes the age-based inspection policy that performs planned inspections at predetermined intervals, by considering that an inspection can also be triggered by a certain number of alerts from the predictive model. To optimize the proposed inspection policy, a stochastic dynamic programming model is formulated with the objective of minimizing the long-run expected cost rate. The performance improvement achieved by the optimal policy is quantified by comparing it to practically relevant benchmark policies. Numerical experiments with a set of realistic problem instances show that adding alert-triggered inspections to traditional age-based inspection scheduling brings up to 44% reduction in the expected cost rate when the predictive model is sufficiently accurate. Characterizing the performance of the optimal policy at a given level of imperfectness is especially useful in practice as it allows making an assessment on how much can be invested to justify a certain level of improvement in the predictive model.

Keywords: Maintenance; Inspection planning; Imperfect predictive alerts; Delay-time model; Dynamic programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:298:y:2022:i:2:p:510-525

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2021.05.051

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