Optimization of preventive maintenance through a combined maintenance-production simulation model

Maintenance problems are crucial aspect of nowadays industrial problems. However, the quest of the efficient periodicity of maintenance for all components of a system is far from an easy task to accomplish when considering all the antagonistic criteria of the maintenance and production views of a production system. Thus, the objective is to simultaneously ensure a low frequency of failures by an efficient periodic preventive maintenance and minimize the unavailability of the system due to preventive maintenance. This implies aminimum impact on the production. In this paper, several tools are combined to collaborate in order to optimize multi-component preventive maintenance problems. The structure of the maintenance-production system is modeled thanks to a framework inspired by our previous research projects. The dynamic aspects are modeled by a combination of timed petri-nets and PDEVS models and implemented in our VLE simulator. The parameters of the resulting simulationmodel are optimized via a Nelder–Mead (Simplex) Method. & 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.