Simulation and Comparison of Equipment Maintenance Strategies—A Blast Furnace Belt Conveyor Example

In recent years, a number of industrial accidents took place in turns, resulting in enormous economic loss, personnel lives loss, and environmental disasters. Industrial accidents arise mostly from equipment failures. Traditional time-based maintenance appears have reached its limit to prevent more accidents. New strategies turn to condition-based maintenance (CBM), which continuously monitors equipment so that failures can be detected just in time. The new strategies can be expensive and difficult to implement in current equipment. Under increasing cost pressure, enterprise has difficulties to evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies. This paper presents a reliability simulation to evaluate and compare different maintenance strategies, from both cost and productivity perspectives. A blast furnace belt conveyor is used as a demonstration example. In addition, experiment design and multiple comparison procedures are used to give statistical analysis. It is expected this research can help industries evaluate and select an appropriate maintenance strategy to further reduce future equipment failures and associated losses.