Optimizing Maintenance Strategies : Concept & Techniques

Maintenance management is one of the main focuses in industrial sector. Many maintenance functions with varieties optimization models have been proposed to aid maintenance management. This paper describes maintenance techniques and concepts of decision making systems (DMS) for diagnose faults and generate efficient maintenance and production schedules. The proposed integrated system is composed of three modules, namely, the Diagnosis Module, the Maintenance Planning Module, and the Scheduling Module. In the Diagnosis Module, a vector of symptoms is fed into an influence diagram representing the causal relationships of the system. Given an instantiation of the symptom vector, a stochastic sampling algorithm is applied to update the joint-probability distribution associated with the influence diagram and rank the possible causes of the symptoms. The maintenance planning module searches a look-up-table to find maintenance activities to correct the fault. The scheduling module determines the job sequences, including a maintenance activity that can minimize make span, or total completion time. Higher product quality, better reliability, better availability of plants, optimization of cost and choosing right maintenance procedure is the chief concern now a days. Maintenance is generally recognized as a single largest controllable cost and status quo represents a challenge for leading managements to reevaluate their maintenance strategies, decision making work attempts to understand various maintenance policies making for better maintenance of assets. This paper presents different techniques of decision making systems (DMS) that takes process-state information from several critical points in the system, and uses this information to determine the most probable faults and maintenance strategy.

Keywords:

Decision Making , Maintenance Policies , Expert System , Fuzzy Logic , Maintenance Techniques ,