PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE AT OPPORTUNITIES OF RESTRICTED DURATION

This article deals with the problem of setting priorities for the exec ution of maintenance packages at randomly occurring opportunities. The se opportunities are of restricted duration, implying that only a limi ted number of packages can be executed. The main idea proposed is to s et up a model for determining the optimal execution time for the indiv idual maintenance packages and to develop cost criteria for deviations from the optimal time. In this article we use the block replacement m odel, but the approach can be easily extended to include other optimiz ation models as well. Using Monte Carlo simulation the performance of the method is compared with various heuristics, both for a two-package and a multipackage case. (C) 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.