Information requirements for e-maintenance strategic planning: A benchmark study in complex production systems

摘要

The selection of the maintenance policy is one of the most important decisions of strategic maintenance management. It guarantees not only adequate control of the maintenance costs but also competitive performances of the production system in terms of safety, availability and quality. An optimised selection of the maintenance policy also serves the competitiveness of an e-maintenance service. This calls for fine tuning with the conditions of one plant operations, henceforth integration is required between the plant management and the e-maintenance service provider. Integration may be organised at different levels, i.e. at the strategic or operational level. The paper is concerned with the strategic planning of an e-maintenance service, to properly size the maintenance logistics support. It will present a discussion on the information required to select the policy in the case of an age based component replacement. A test will also prove the information requirements in the context of a simulated machining line wherein the most important loss is system unavailability. A benchmark study is performed therein, in order to analyse how the selection of the maintenance policy may change when information is collected with regard to the production system as a whole instead of its separate equipments. The study will demonstrate that the maintenance policy may change depending on the analysis level, i.e. from equipment level to production system level. The analysis at equipment level will reveal itself to be not so accurate, if compared with the analysis at the system level, as far as the line layout is endowed with some flexibility features and it is operated in a range of medium to high saturation rates. A more comprehensive analysis at the production system level will conversely achieve better performances though a reduced number of preventive maintenance stops during the e-maintenance service operation.