(58j) Development of an Optimal Maintenance Scheduling Framework for Maintenance 4.0 Applications

Machine maintenance is a critical process for any manufacturing facility, ensuring profitability, safety and sustainability. Traditional schedule-based maintenance policies are highly conservative, and have potential to miss critically required maintenance actions in place of scheduled jobs. These approaches are labour intensive, expensive, and introduce unnecessary safety risk through unneeded maintenance. Recent advances in process monitoring and fault detection in the wake of industry 4.0 give unit specific insight into the condition and degradation characteristics of manufacturing equipment in multi-component systems. Here we utilise knowledge of upcoming equipment failures to create an optimal maintenance schedule based upon a multi-criteria decision making approach. We optimise the schedule for cost factoring in typical constraints faced by maintenance planners including production demand, parts and labour availability, and task specific constraints such as specialised labour or equipment. We adjust the maintenance schedule based on safety critical equipment, utilising risk management frameworks (HAZOP, LOPA etc.) to understand the consequence of missed maintenance. Relevant regulatory frameworks are considered in the scheduling criterion such that maintenance standards are upheld. When applied to a number of simulated case studies, this method shows a significant increase in process uptime, an increase in labour utilisation and effectiveness and a subsequent reduction in overall plant costs.