A Methodology for Maintenance-Interval Scheduling of Equipment Considering Maintenance Effect

This paper presents a methodology for maintenance-interval scheduling of equipment considering maintenance effect. By means of an operable ordering list of maintenance effects, all elements in a system can be ranked. For different purpose, maintenance intervals of elements can be scheduled as below. In order to reduce maintenance cost remarkably within a scale of system availability decrease, maintenance intervals of some elements with smaller maintenance effects are lengthened to decrease the number of system maintenance; In order to keep original system availability while reducing maintenance cost, maintenance intervals of some elements with larger maintenance effects are shortened to increase system availability, and at the same time maintenance intervals of some elements with smaller maintenance effects are lengthened to decrease the number of system maintenance. Based on this method, the maintenance intervals of equipments in thermal power stations are scheduled by use of the actual data from Kyushu Electric Power Co. of Japan, and thereby the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified. The proposed method can be adopted for many kinds of equipments or systems.