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The purpose of this paper is to develop a preventive maintenance (PM) model that encounters the problems of traditional methods of conducting PM within high component/machine variety environments.

A new platform to conduct planning of the PM actions by using clustering based on the Group Technology concept to create PM virtual cells of equipment/machines is introduced. A real case study at Arab Potash Company was used to illustrate the model. The component/machine variety that requires PM at the considered company is in thousands of items.

PM for high component/machine environments are not enough addressed in the literature. The concept of clustering and similarity coefficient was used and found very useful to model this situation.

The proposed procedure will assist maintenance managers/engineers in too many ways. It will help to optimize the inventory of the spare parts, and to create standard process plan for executing the preventive maintenance operation.

This paper presents a new procedure to implement preventive maintenance in high component/machine environments using clustering technique concept. Models that address this concept are rare and very limited in the literature.

The aim of this paper is to illustrate a solution that can be used to reduce the severity of breakdowns and improve performances in the cellular manufacturing (CM) system with unreliable machines.

The performance of CM system is conditioned by disruptive events, such as the failure of machines, which randomly occurs and penalizes the performance of the cells, seriously disturbing the smooth working of the factory. To overcome the problem caused by the breakdowns, the authors develop a solution, based on the principle of virtual cell and the notion of intercellular transfer that can improve the availability of the system. In this context, the use an analytical method based on Markov chains to model the availability of the cell. The results are validated using simulation.

The proposed solution in this paper confirmed that it is possible to reduce the severity of breakdowns in the CM system and improve the availability of the cells through an intercellular transfer created at the time of a breakdown. Simulation allowed a validation of the analytical model and showed the contribution of the suggested solution.

The developed approach studies the performance of the production cells formed by unreliable machines. It uses the notion of the intercellular transfer to improve the availability of the cells.

Lean manufacturing is an operational strategy oriented toward achieving the shortest possible cycle time by eliminating waste. It is derived from the Toyota Production System and its key thrust is to increase the value-added work by eliminating waste and reducing incidental work. In today's competitive global marketplace, the concept of lean manufacturing has gained vital consciousness to all manufacturing sectors, their supply chains, and hence a logical measurement index system is indeed required in implementing leanness in practice. Such leanness estimation can help the enterprises to assess their existing leanness level and can compare different industries who are adapting this lean concept. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The present work exhibits an efficient fuzzy-based leanness assessment system using generalized interval-valued (IV) trapezoidal fuzzy numbers set. The concept of “degree of similarity” between two IV fuzzy numbers has been explored here to identify ill-performing areas towards lean achievement.

The methodology described here has been found fruitful while applying for a particular industry, in India, as a case study. Apart from estimating overall lean performance metric, the model presented here can identify ill-performing areas towards lean achievement.

The major contributions of this work have been summarized as follows: development and implementation of an efficient decision-making procedural hierarchy to support leanness extent evaluation. An overall lean performance index evaluation platform has been introduced. Concept of generalized IV trapezoidal fuzzy numbers has been efficiently explored to facilitate this decision-making. The appraisement index system has been extended with the capability to search ill-performing areas which require future progress.