The development of an integrated mathematical and knowledge-based maintenance delivery system

In this paper, the authors investigate a maintenance problem from a continuous manufacturing environment. The specific maintenance policies to be considered are whether to have replacement, minimal repair or no action. The objective function is based on discounted costs and will be structured so that changes in manufacturing conditions can be easily incorporated into the decision-making process. The delivery tool for the mathematical model will be a system integrating a rule-based expert system with an optimization procedure involving the mathematical analysis of replacement models.