Maintenance Grouping in Multi-Step Multi-Component Production Systems

Since maintenance jobs often require one or more preparatory set-up activities to be carried out in advance, there is a perspective of significant savings in both set-up times and costs by conducting these jobs simultaneously (maintenance grouping). This chapter starts with an overview of commonly used maintenance grouping theories and practices at different planning levels. To this end, a clear distinction is made between long term (static), medium term (dynamic) and short term (opportunistic) grouping possibilities. Subsequently, and in much more detail, we investigate the possibilities for long term grouping (clustering) of preventive maintenance jobs in a multi-setup multi-component production system. More specifically, we consider the case where each component is maintained preventively at an integer multiple of a certain basis interval, which is the same for all components, and corrective maintenance is carried out in between whenever necessary. A general mathematical modeling framework is presented which allows for a large class of failure characteristics and preventive maintenance strategies for each component.