Title: Best period of time for performing shutdown maintenance

Authors: Adel M. Al-Shayea

Addresses: Industrial Engineering Department, College of Engineering, King Saud University, P.O. Box 800, Riyadh 11421, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Abstract: Most of continuous process industries tend to arbitrary shorting the duration of shutdown maintenance and return back to production state in order to reduce the maintenance cost or to increase the profit by taking advantage of high market demand and prices of their products. By arbitrary shorting the duration of shutdown maintenance, the plants in these industries expose themselves to unplanned stoppages of their production system. These unplanned stoppages will cause harm to the inside and outside environments and it will sharply affect the company profit. The proposed mathematical model developed in this paper aims at finding out the best period for performing shutdown maintenance. It is based on determining the period of time during the predetermined time horizon for performing shutdown maintenance activities in which the maintenance cost and the loss of production that is caused by shutdown maintenance are in their lowest levels.

Keywords: maintenance costs; production loss; predetermined time horizons; maintenance timing; shutdown maintenance; continuous process industries; arbitrary shorting; production state; cost reduction; profits; high demand; market demand; product prices; industrial plants; unplanned stoppages; production systems; mathematical models; collaborative enterprises; collaboration; maintenance modelling; maintenance management.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCENT.2011.043826

International Journal of Collaborative Enterprise, 2011 Vol.2 No.4, pp.275 - 283

Published online: 23 Nov 2011 *

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