Title: An effective opportunistic maintenance policy for a global service

Authors: Toni Lupo

Addresses: Dipartimento di Tecnologia Meccanica, Produzione e Ingegneria Gestionale, Universita degli Studi di Palermo, Palermo 90128, Italy

Abstract: The aim of the present paper is to develop a model for an effective maintenance policy with refer to a global service contract between a services provider company and a company for the waste management. The contract requires, with fixed performance levels of the service, the supplying of a mandatory set of maintenance services on a set of waste compactors vehicles of the outsourcer company. In particular, the service provider (SP) must perform corrective maintenance actions and the replacement of the fault parts. The tackled problem concerns the determination of an effective opportunistic maintenance policy in order to assure the required service performance levels at the minimum global maintenance cost. The problem is mathematically formulated by a constrained partition model that becomes difficult or very hard to solve by mathematical approach for large practical systems as that one here considered. For this reason, in order to solve the proposed problem of maintenance services optimisation, a genetic approach is developed.

Keywords: opportunistic maintenance; global service contract; series system; corrective maintenance; maintenance services optimisation; maintenance groups; services providers; waste management; waste compactor vehicles; genetic algorithms; GAs.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSCI.2010.032222

International Journal of Services Sciences, 2010 Vol.3 No.2/3, pp.179 - 193

Published online: 17 Mar 2010 *

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