Preventive Maintenance Scheduling using Markov Chain Analysis

Preventive maintenance involves monitoring of working states of equipment and machines continuously so as to intervene with a maintenance action whenever the performance of the unit drops below an acceptable level. Too frequent interventions increase downtime and loss of production, whereas too few interventions lead to unreliability of the unit and possibility of catastrophic failure. Hence there is an optimal schedule of maintenance. The study will involve development of a numerical algorithm to determine the optimal schedule of maintenance using the well-known Markov Chain analysis technique. The work will build upon a pre-existing study from our laboratory.