Computer aided maintenance planning

Abstract

Recently, in developing countries, the importance of maintenance planning is being well understood by the management of big companies, especially in industries where losses caused by sudden failures are very high. For every company, there exists a trade off between the costs incurred in unexpected failures and costs invested in the planned maintenance activities of the company. On the one hand, sudden failures lead into significant production time losses, which, in turn, usually have very high associated costs. On the other hand, for a planned maintenance system, the number of necessary maintenance personnel is higher, and a safety spare parts stock should be kept available at hand, which both have a considerable cost, but since the replacement time is much shorter, the down time costs will be negligable when compared with failure replacement policy. In this thesis it is aimed to devise an interactive computer program to aid the decision maker in planning maintenance activities. The program will help the maintenance planner in developing efficient scheduling, as well as identifying correct maintenance periods and determining minimum safety spare parts stock levels. Bekoteknik San. A.Ş., a producer of consumer electronics, is selected as the pilot factory, but the model is designed in such, a way to enabJe easy adaptation to other factories, provided past data about the current machinery is available.