CONSIDERATION OF UNRELIABLE OUTSOURCING IN THE PRODUCTION AND MAINTENANCE STRATEGY

This article studies the interaction between production, maintenance and subcontracting strategies that appear in modern production systems and that are necessary to be able to satisfy the demand requested by customers. The system under study undergoes a deterioration process that mainly influences the quality of the products. In the production strategy, a traditional strategy is considered, which, being unable to meet the demand due to the effects of deterioration, resorts to a subcontractor, which is assumed to be unreliable. The system tends to experience random failures, which are minimally repaired and major maintenance can be resorted to which restores the unit to its initial condition. The objective of the study is to analyze a joint production and maintenance strategy considering quality deterioration, outsourcing and minimizing total cost. Considering the stochastic dynamics of the system, simulation techniques are used, where the descriptive capabilities of simulation are combined with statistical analysis and optimization methods. The simulation model is validated by means of several techniques in order to ensure that the results are applicable to real systems. A sensitivity analysis is also presented in order to highlight the cost reduction with the proposed strategy.