Performance-based maintenance planning for asset fleets

摘要

In the operation of assets in the process industry it is common to perform maintenance actions in order to improve the reliability and productivity of the assets. Due to limited capacities of maintenance personnel and tight production schedules, it is important to find an optimal way to plan and schedule maintenance actions. Another common problem in industry is the high energy demand of machinery. During operation there occurs a recoverable degradation and by performing maintenance the efficiency level of an asset can be increased. However, maintenance is mostly performed to prevent machine failure. In this paper, an approach is introduced in which the performance degradation of an asset becomes an additional dimension to consider when maintenance actions are planned. A general formulation of the planning problem is introduced and an industry-inspired case study is used to test the new formulation. The new approach is expected to reduce the overall cost of operation by decreasing the energy input and by increasing the average throughput of assets through more optimal maintenance scheduling.