Random preventive maintenance policy based on inspection for a multicomponent system using simulation

Abstract

In today’s global situation where highly competitive companies demand production efficiently to reduce costs, increase product quality, and customer loyalty, maintenance becomes crucial to achieve this goal by reducing unplanned downtime, reworking of products, and costs. In this sense, the use of models that can represent this type of system, and help managers make decisions more easily, are of vital importance for companies. Thus, a preventive maintenance model for a multicomponent system with different failure mechanisms is proposed in this work. Considering that the objective is to optimize the number and the time of maintenance interventions, that will be done in the system, periodic inspections are carried out in order to minimize the expected costs of maintenance. The optimization was performed with simulation, which proved to be satisfactory, since the decision variables of the model behaved adequately when utilized within the context of an applied case study. In addition, these variables had different performances when analyzed in four different scenarios: the original model of the proposed policy, and three variations attributing costs of penalties.