Optimal preventive maintenance interval model with time value of money consideration

The search for a plant maintenance strategy to mitigate the impact of random factory machine failures has never been more challenging. Apart from the harsh global competition, manufacturing facilities have become more sophisticated and expensive; frequent and prolonged breakdowns may ruin a firm’s business. Consequently, many have turned to the Preventive Maintenance (PM) strategy for a solution. However, the efficacy of PM has been shown to depend on finding a maintenance time interval decision model capable of incorporating most of the relevant maintenance cost components. While past studies have considered maintenance system set-up, execution, and breakdown cost components, the literature is sparse on decision models incorporating the cost of borrowing money. Exploring the feasibility of developing such a model is the aim of this study. Accordingly, a maintenance-investment cost function was formulated in terms of PM time interval and plant reliability; a PM decision problem was then defined and solved as that of PM investment cost minimization. Using three cases from the literature, the optimal maintenance time intervals (238.11, 14695.28, and 2076.54), failure probabilities (0.71, 0.35, and 0.61), and costs for preventive maintenance (PM) (840950.87, 149352.55, and 33979.57) were found to be reasonable.