Management of industrial maintenance – economic evaluation of maintenance policies

Abstract

One of the main problems, when choosing between preventive or corrective maintenance for the production and maintenance departments in the eight firms studied, is to attempt to establish the state of a particular production system or individual production line. In order to carry out a cost analysis it is imperative to be able to measure how preventive maintenance will both reduce the deterioration of the state of the object and improve the state of the object at the point in time that the maintenance is carried out. This can be explained by the fact that the departments lack methods for measuring and estimating the effects. The model presented in this paper determines whether to schedule preventive maintenance and the model trades off the capital costs of preventive maintenance and the sum of corrective maintenance and down‐time costs based on the production line’s state.