Preventive maintenance at opportunities of restricted duration

This article deals with the problem of setting priorities for the execution of maintenance packages at randomly occurring opportunities. These opportunities are of restricted duration, implying that only a limited number of packages can be executed. The main idea proposed is to set up a model for determining the optimal execution time for the individual maintenance packages and to develop cost criteria for deviations from the optimal time. In this article the authors use the block replacement model, but the approach can be easily extended to include other optimization models as well. Using Monte Carlo simulation the performance of the method is compared with various heuristics, both for a two-package and a multipackage case.