Maintenance Planning and Scheduling In Plastic Industry

Abstract

Maintenance planning and scheduling is used in almost every manufacturing firm due to its highly importance in production. It decreases the downtime of the machines and increases the associated availability leading to an improvement of the manufacturing yield. The ratio between the preplanned maintenance activities and the total maintenance load performed represents a good performance key indicator. High values of this indicator show the best practice of the associated firm. In the other side, for small and medium companies they often relie on corrective maintenance. That is to say, they only fix machines when they breakdown. This maintenance strategy leads to very high production penalties especially for critical equipment. The objective of this project is to manage and provide a preventive maintenance plan for each machine, as a tactical level of maintenance planning. In such plan, all preventive activities of the specified machines has been scheduled according to the associated time intervals that may be daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly. Moreover, for each maintenance activity the standardized process has been developed in order to show the best way of its making. In addition, the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) was implemented on the plastic manufacturing firm. On the operational planning level, a time horizon has been defined for representing the operational scheduling of maintenance activities. In this case a planning and scheduling problem has been modeled mathematical and solved optimally. Applying such maintenance planning and schedule program reduced efficiently the downtime of machines and enhanced the manufacturing capability. The current project has been conducted on a factory that is dedicated to produce plastic bottles using injection and blowing plastic machines