Optimising preventive maintenance schedule for a distillery plant

Abstract

In today's era of automation, the maintenance of complex systems is necessary for obtaining high payback ratios. Time has changed the thinking of plant/maintenance managers from the fix-it-broken approach to the preventive maintenance approach for bringing back deteriorated components/systems to predetermined operational conditions. But since resources are limited therefore it is required to achieve an effective maintenance approach to minimise the total maintenance cost and equipment downtime. This paper presents the framework for deciding the optimal schedules for preventive maintenance under constraints of the maintenance cost, availability and revenue generation. The programming package Mathematica is used to solve the complex equations of the framework and finding the optimal preventive maintenance schedule. The practical case of a distillery plant is considered to gauge the effectiveness of this approach.