Optimal Maintenance Probabilities and Preventive Replacement Maintenance Policy for Photocopy Machines

Abstract

The need for suitable replacement policies are essential to minimize down time, maintenance cost and maximize the availability and reliability of equipment. On this premise, this work models the failure rate of Photocopy machines and obtain its optimal preventive maintenance policy that would prevent damage and its attendant losses to both users and end-product consumers. The failure distribution of the machine was shown to follow the Log-Logistic distribution with shape parameter, ˆα=1.723339368 and scale parameter, ˆβ=763.9219635. Optimal probabilities of the distribution were obtained and utilized in both the cumulative failure function and cumulative hazard function-based replacement models to formulate a replacement maintenance policy for the machine. The failure cumulative function-based replacement model was found to be a better model which yields optimal replacement maintenance time of 166 hours at a minimum cost of 113 Naira for maintaining the machine per cycle time with 96% availability, 94% reliability and 0.07% chance of failure occurrence in the machine.