Conceptual Design of an Integrated Autonomous Production Control Model in association with a Prescriptive Maintenance Model (PriMa)

Autonomous production control models facilitate coping with co-occurrent and ever-growing production system complexity. The choice of the appropriate control model and objective function in manufacturing industry depends on several interrelated factors such as machine and process flexibility, plant availability, process stability, resource utilization, environmental and economic sustainability. Numerous theoretical models and approaches for autonomous production control have been proposed. Yet, it is hard to determine the effectiveness of efforts in real-life applications, due to neglecting or incomplete consideration of the aforementioned factors. This paper concentrates on the correlative relation between production planning and control (PPC) and maintenance planning. An integrated approach is presented that establishes the link between autonomous production control and prescriptive maintenance model (PriMa). Traditionally, PPC and maintenance planning are carried out apart from one another. In the light of PriMa, various aspects of data-driven maintenance planning and the missing link with autonomous production control are discussed. To this end, this paper presents a conceptual model, which encompasses three sub-systems, namely i) maintenance system, ii) autonomous production control system, and iii) production planning. The proposed model is intended to reduce planning complexity and at the same time achieve an improved plant availability and resource efficiency.