A Formal Approach for Preventive Maintenance Workload Balancing

There is a strong relationship between maintenance planning and production scheduling as both services operate on the same assets and their availability. Many academic research papers and experimental techniques have been developed to synchronize activities between these two inter-dependent key roles in all companies. These techniques are taken into account and implemented in several maintenance management systems to enhance communication and synchronization during the maintenance management process. However, there is no sufficient improvements in the earlier steps of this process. Preventive maintenance workload balancing consists of having a high level abstraction of the asset availability for maintenance work, based on a crossover of maintenance resource availability and operation constraints. It is an earlier task of the maintenance management process. In this paper, we have developed a formal approach for balancing the preventive maintenance workload. This approach allows us to pinpoint the problems and possible irregularities on time in order to obtain the desired behaviors and areas for improvement. The formal workload balancing for preventive maintenance significantly reduces the consumption of necessary resources and provides a good distribution of workload while considering operational constraints.