Guidelines for implementing predictive maintenance

Recent advances in predictive maintenance technologies have led many manufacturers to abandon traditional periodic maintenance policies and replace them with predictive maintenance policies. The models in this paper explicitly evaluate the decision to utilize both predictive and periodic maintenance when the objective is to minimize expected maintenance costs per unit time. Renewal theory is used to obtain optimal policies as unique solutions of integral equations that depend on the failure distribution and prediction capabilities. Based on this research, we recommend that practitioners do not abandon the traditional maintenance methods but follow our guidelines for utilizing periodic maintenance in conjunction with the new technologies.