Combining maintenance activities in an operational planning phase: A set-partitioning approach

Joint execution of maintenance activities can reduce costs because preparative activities, like opening a machine, may be shared. Combining execution, however, also implies that activities are carried out at times other than originally planned. In this paper, the authors analyse the problem of determining which activities should be combined at which moments in time. They develop a methodology to represent the cost-effectiveness of combining activities, and to identify an optimal combination plan. The method consists of three phases: one in which penalty cost functions are derived, another in which combinations are evaluated, and finally one in which the optimal combination is obtained through a set-partitioning algorithm.