Optimal scheduling of multiple preventive maintenance activities

Abstract

This paper is concerned with scheduling multiple periodic preventive maintenance (PM) activities. This scheduling problem is formulated as partitioned integer linear programming (ILP) models based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem. Since the number of necessary variables and constraints of the proposed partitioned ILP model does not grow rapidly with the number of activities, the computation time and memory requirements are of a negligible nature. For a small problem involving a decade or so activities, the scheduling can be carried out very simply by hand. An example is given to illustrate the approach.