Evaluation of Preventive Maintenance Segregation: A Multi Factorial Study

Recently, several papers on preventive maintenance (PM) have shown that segregation of PM's can be beneficial when it comes to improving factory performance. However, these were limited to either cases of equal PM segregation and/or without consideration of other factors and operating conditions such as incurred setup or the number of tools in the toolset. In this paper, we extend previous work in this area in two major respects. First, we consider the more realistic case of PM segregation into equal or unequal portions and second, we evaluate the impact of PM segregation under various operating conditions via simulation. Our simulation experiments provide insight and guidelines for practitioners in planning the PM activity such that the overall performance is improved.