A New Maintenance Strategy of Combining Preventive Maintenance and Opportunistic Maintenance

Abstract

This paper develops a new preventive maintenance (PM) strategy with opportunistic maintenance (OM) considered for the industries facing the problem of equipment wearing out. All the existing strategies are based on the fixed PM intervals, no matter acquired from the vendor or the optimization results in previous literature. Opportunistic maintenance is known as a good way to reduce the system total down time, but seldom does any paper make the discussion on when and how to conduct it. In the proposed new PM strategy, the flexibility upon the fixed PM interval is introduced. Some types of PM can be postponed, while some can be done in advance. Thus, PM on different components can be combined together to reduce the system down time. Besides, an opportunistic maintenance trigger is considered in this strategy, which can give the engineers an instruction on whether the OM is worth doing for a component when the system is down because of the failure of another component.To evaluate the new PM strategy, we use a 3-component serial system as the case study. The results illustrate that compared with the other existing PM strategies, the proposed strategy is dramatically better with the lowest cost.