Preventive maintenance scheduling of the pulping unit in a paper plant

This paper presents periodic preventive maintenance (PM) of a system with deteriorated components. PM is one of the strategies that can be applied to reduce the machine breakdown problems due to unplanned maintenance. However, finding the best interval for providing the necessary PM actions is an important issue. In that direction, this paper studies PM in simultaneously considering three actions, mechanical service, repair and replacement for a multi-components system based on maintenance cost. The cost function of a maintenance policy is used to determine the component replacement interval. However, the PM interval of the system is chosen as the minimum among them. The degraded behavior of the component is modeled by a reliability equation, and the effect of PM actions to reliability is formulated based on maximizing the maintenance-benefit analysis. The application of the proposed framework has been demonstrated through the pulping unit of a paper mill situated in a northern part of India which produces approximately 200 tons of paper per day.