Scheduling of routine maintenance using production schedules and equipment failure history

Ideally all maintenance should be routine, and should be performed to prevent pre-mature equipment failure. From the practical viewpoint of maintenance in a manufacturing environment it is important to know when in the production cycle it is most advantageous for equipment to be removed from service for repair. This paper describes a model that was developed for scheduling of routine maintenance at an aggregate level in a manufacturing environment. The model utilizes the production plan and the equipment failure history to develop a maintenance schedule. The objective is to choose a maintenance action so that the expected costs of breakdown of equipment are minimized. Different maintenance schedules are generated and the schedule that gives the least expected cost is selected as the maintenance plan for the equipment. The model is implemented on a North Star microcomputer.