Coordinated Planning of Preventive Maintenance in Hierarchical Production Systems

We consider a technical system consisting of multiple different components, which are all subject to failure. Creating an occasion for preventive maintenance on one of these components requires a collection of preparatory set-up activities to be carried out in advance, with corresponding set-up costs. Since different components may require one or more shared set-up activities, there is a perspective of significant gains if preventive maintenance activities are carried out simultaneously. In this paper, we consider the case where each component is maintained preventively at an integer multiple of a certain basis interval, which is the same for all components. A general mathematical framework is presented which allows for multiple set-up activities, multiple components, and a large class of preventive maintenance strategies for each component.