The economics of preventive maintenance -A grouping genetic algorithm approach

As manufactured goods become more complex and customer's expectations grow, increased attention is being paid to maintenance and improving product quality. To avoid the huge losses caused by sudden failures, the present manufacturers of the Hi-Tech industry requires highly reliable and stable equipment. Enterprises have invested more and more resources to maximize machine durability and efficiency in order to maintain good operation of the process flow. After using many resources to improve the tactics of maintenance, the management of the company would like to investigate and assess the present situation of maintenance and the possibility of further improvement. Although a large number of studies have been made on preventive maintenance, little is known about the preventive maintenance planning based on the concept of economics. The main purpose of this study is to construct the Preventive maintenance policies based on Economics. Various treatment methods and maintenance policies are discussed and summarized from the rapidly growing literature. And the model of the economics of preventive maintenance is presented by using the concept of the capital budgeting in this paper. This study proposes a two-step approach. The first step is to propose a function of availability for the singlecomponent and multi-component. And the primary model is constructed based on the grouping genetic algorithm. The second step is to propose an economics perspective of the preventive maintenance model. The single-component and multi-component model are analyzed by the simulation. This study will tell the manager if it is worthwhile to implement the maintenance project or not.