The Development Of Knowledge For Maintenance Management Using Simulation

    Authors

    N. M. Paz; W. Leigh;R. V. Rogers

    Comments

    Authors: contact us about adding a copy of your work at STARS@ucf.edu

    Abbreviated Journal Title

    IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern.

    Keywords

    DISPATCHING RULES; SHOP; Computer Science, Cybernetics; Engineering, Electrical & Electronic

    Abstract

    The management of maintenance is an area of great concern for any industry that depends on the smooth running of equipment to produce a product or carry out a mission at a profit or at low cost. Maintenance managers must have access to advanced information systems to help them plan their work forces and control operating costs more efficiently. This paper describes a method and demonstrates its use to develop a knowledge base for a Maintenance Supervisor Assistant System (MSAS). MSAS interacts with the maintenance manager on a periodic basis in order to select, for the next period of operations, the proper policies and techniques to meet management objectives. The first stage of the method is the knowledge acquisition phase. For this phase, an object-oriented computer simulation model has been developed as a testbed for examining different scheduling heuristics and manning policies in a range of maintenance environments. The dimensions of the maintenance environment which are considered include: preventive maintenance policies, staffing policies, downtime costs, simultaneous downtime practices, travel time impacts, and backlog policies. The dependent variables of interest include: overall machine availability, critical machine availability, worker utilization, cost of the maintenance function, and work order completion time. The second stage of the method is a knowledge engineering effort to codify what is learned from the stage one simulation experiments into a knowledge base for a Maintenance Supervisor Assistant System. A procedure for deriving expert system rules from simulation experiments is demonstrated. This is followed by validation of the knowledge base through re-employment of the simulation model.

    Journal Title

    Ieee Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics

    Volume

    24

    Issue/Number

    4

    Publication Date

    1-1-1994

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    574

    Last Page

    593

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:A1994NR45000004

    ISSN

    0018-9472

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