Planning and optimizing the maintenance of paper production systems in a paper plant

Manufacturing and production plants operate physical assets that deteriorate with usage and time, thus, maintenance actions are required to restore the assets back to their original Predetermined operational conditions. But since, organizational resources are limited and scarce. The objective of an effective maintenance program is to minimize total cost of inspection and repair, and equipment downtime. In this paper, we describe a new multi-criteria optimization framework for deriving optimal maintenance schedules for preventive maintenance which considers availability, maintenance cost and life cycle costs as the criteria for optimization. The Simulink toolbox of the Matlab has been interfaced with Genetic algorithm for optimization. After getting solution, Stochastic Petri nets has been used to model the system and find out the effect of optimized maintenance schedules on system performance. The application of the proposed framework has been discussed on a practical case of a paper plant. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.