The influence of condition-based maintenance on workforce planning and maintenance scheduling

Condition-based maintenance (CBM) is generally considered an attractive maintenance policy for a single component: it uses the operating condition of the component to predict a failure event and therefore tries to avoid any unplanned downtime and unnecessary maintenance activities. However, operations managers tend to be much more interested in optimising the performance of the entire asset-system, where the grouping of maintenance activities and the availability of maintenance workers may play a role. Therefore, this paper focuses on the impact of using either CBM or age-based replacement (ABR) in serial and parallel multi-component systems (1) without worker constraints, (2) with a single internal maintenance worker, and (3) with external maintenance workers with a significant response time. With an internal maintenance worker, the sequential execution of maintenance activities prevents efficiency gains in the serial configuration and here CBM performs better. Also in the parallel configurations, the efficiency under CBM is generally better than under ABR. However, with external maintenance workers, CBM is not able to group maintenance activities as well as ABR, which results in a lower efficiency in the serial configuration. CBM performs better than ABR with respect to total maintenance costs, while ABR results in a smoother maintenance plan.