A Dynamic Policy for Grouping Maintenance Activities

A maintenance activity carried out on a technical system often involves a system-dependent set-up cost that is the same for all maintenance activities carried out on that system. Grouping activities thus saves costs since execution of a group of activities requires only one set-up. Many maintenance models consider the grouping of maintenance activities on a long-term basis with an infinite horizon. This makes it very difficult to incorporate short-term circumstances such as opportunities or a varying use of components because these are either not known beforehand or make the problem intractable. In this paper we propose a rolling-horizon approach that takes a long-term tentative plan as a basis for a subsequent adaptation according to information that becomes available on the short term. This yields a dynamic grouping policy that assists the maintenance manager in his planning job. We present a fast approach that allows interactive planning by showing how shifts from the tentative planning work out. We illustrate our approach with examples.