Maintenance modelling and optimization integrating strategies and human resources: Theory and case study

Reliability centred maintenance is a systematic methodology to establish an efficient maintenance plan to cope with all of the equipment's dominant failure causes. Its main objective is to find out the best set of maintenance strategies (i.e. maintenance plan) that provide appropriate balance of equipment reliability and availability and associated costs. A weakness of the traditional method is that maintenance planning is formulated in terms of a multiple objective optimization problem where RAM+C act as decision criteria, and maintenance strategies (i.e. maintenance tasks intervals) act as the only decision variables. However, the appropriate development of each maintenance strategy depends not only on the maintenance intervals but also on the resources available to implement such strategies over a given period. This paper presents the development and a case of application of a model for maintenance planning that integrates maintenance strategies and human resources affecting RAM+C criteria.