A Hierarchical Framework for Spares-Driven Maintenance Tasks’ Reviewing, Planning and Scheduling

This paper explores the impacts of reviewing the time to replace of spare parts under the lenses of reliability- and cost-based optimization with the attempt to reduce the cost of a maintenance plan within a harshly constrained maintenance tasks’ scheduling problem. A hierarchical procedure for a robust reliability prediction and scheduling of maintenance tasks is introduced to this purpose. This study takes inspiration from real applications of the preventive maintenance (PM) scheduling process on high-throughput packing and manufacturing lines counting hundreds of functional groups and thousands of components subject to failures and replacements. We investigate the role and the criticality of data entry in the not polynomial (NP)-hard cost-based and reliability-based scheduling problem proposed by Manzini et al. (R. Manzini, R. Accorsi, T. Cennerazzo, E. Ferrari and F. Maranesi, The scheduling of maintenance. A resource-constraints mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model, Comput. Ind. Eng. 87 (2015) 561–568). The proposed reliability-based analysis aids the setting of proper time to failures for spare parts and combines with an analytical single-component and cost-based model to set which maintenance tasks are the most sensitive to the overall cost reduction of a maintenance plan.