Integrated models in production planning and scheduling, maintenance and quality: A review

The integration in production planning, scheduling, maintenance and quality has gained much attention from researchers in recent years. These areas are usually treated independently, which yielded independent models for each function. It is widely believed that these separate models will provide suboptimal solutions, due to the fact that they are interrelated. Proper understanding of this dependency will open a new avenue for more integrated models, and result in significant savings in operational cost and improved efficiency for any production system. This paper reviews the literature on models addressing different aspects of integration in these areas. This integration is treated in two different ways in the literature. The first way is to present models where a model is considered for one function taking into account the other. These models are referred to as interrelated models. The second way is to simultaneously model two or more elements of the production system. These models are referred to as integrated models. The objective of this paper is to review research in both interrelated and integrated modelling of production planning, scheduling, maintenance and quality to identify possible future directions.