Best period of time for performing shutdown maintenance

Abstract

Most of continuous process industries tend to arbitrary shorting the duration of shutdown maintenance and return back to production state in order to reduce the maintenance cost or to increase the profit by taking advantage of high market demand and prices of their products. By arbitrary shorting the duration of shutdown maintenance, the plants in these industries expose themselves to unplanned stoppages of their production system. These unplanned stoppages will cause harm to the inside and outside environments and it will sharply affect the company profit. The proposed mathematical model developed in this paper aims at finding out the best period for performing shutdown maintenance. It is based on determining the period of time during the predetermined time horizon for performing shutdown maintenance activities in which the maintenance cost and the loss of production that is caused by shutdown maintenance are in their lowest levels.