Maintenance Optimisation Model at the Equipment Type Level

Abstract

There is a valuable engineering business opportunity to be gained by judging the optimum balance between the time invested in performing Preventive Maintenance (PM) and Corrective Maintenance (CM). This paper considers this at the equipment type level, which is the Ministry of Defence’s terminology for a set of sub-systems (e.g. engine, gearbox) that operate together and have a unique demand profile as an outright asset that delivers a direct outcome for a Defence Capability programme. It defines a new model to obtain the optimum availability at an optimum cost associated with maintenance. The developed model defines the relationship between maintenance and availability within the military context. The decision support process specifies the budget allocation for preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance by focusing on the probability of failure. The validity of the model has been assessed with real case studies of air and land equipment and confirms that the proposed model is applicable at the Equipment Type level in the military sector. Future work will initially aim to apply the developed process in other sectors and to evaluate the accuracy of the failure distributions.