Preventive Maintenance Subject to Equipment Unavailability

• Published in: IEEE transactions on reliability Vol. 68; no. 3; pp. 1009 - 1020
• Main Authors: Zhu, Zhicheng, Xiang, Yisha, Li, Mingyang, Zhu, Weihang, Schneider, Kellie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.09.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Age-based preventive maintenance (PM); condition-based maintenance (CBM); Equipment costs; equipment unavailability; Inspection; Job shop scheduling; Maintenance engineering; Maintenance management; maintenance rescheduling; Policies; Preventive maintenance; Probability density function; Repair & maintenance; Rescheduling; Schedules; Shutdowns
• ISSN: 0018-9529; 1558-1721
• DOI: 10.1109/TR.2019.2913331

Preventive maintenance has received considerable attention in industries and the literature. Conventional preventive maintenance models often assume that equipment is always available for maintenance activities. However, in many mission-critical industries, equipment may not be available for scheduled maintenance due to busy operational schedules. Forced shutdown of the equipment may incur extra costs that cannot be offset by the benefits from preventively maintaining the equipment. In this paper, we propose innovative preventive maintenance policies to address the challenges caused by equipment unavailability. Maintenance models with possible rescheduling are developed for both time-based and condition-based maintenance policies, and the objective is to minimize the long-run cost rate of all maintenance activities. The proposed policies, with consideration of equipment unavailability for prescheduled PM, are compared with the policies that ignore this unavailability. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the proposed policies.