Plant-level maintenance decision support system for throughput improvement

In the current global scenario of extreme competition, factors such as productivity, availability, quality and cost of operations play a vital role in the success of a company. A critical component relating to all of the above is maintenance. The conventional maintenance decision support systems have primarily focused on maximising the gains of a single machine system. However, a real life application usually consists of multiple machines, and the operational level decisions are more complex. In this paper, an on line plant-level maintenance decision support system (PMDSS) is developed by combining the short term and long term decision making process to improve the overall system performance while continuously attempting to maximise immediate profits in the short term. The PMDSS works towards two basic aims: (1) unplanned downtime reduction by predicting the remaining useful life of the machines, and (2) efficient utilisation of the finite maintenance and production resources through identifying the throughput-critical machines. The benefits of this approach are presented by considering an industrial case study of an automotive assembly line. The results obtained using this PMDSS approach shows a big throughput improvement as compared to the conventional maintenance policies.