Value-driven maintenance planning for a production plant

Maintenance involves maintaining and securing the equipment and systems in, or restoring them to, a state in which they can perform the required functions. The challenge for maintenance planning is to identify appropriate objects and tasks for preventive maintenance and ensure that there are adequate resources for the repair actions. In this paper we will present a maintenance planning approach, called value-driven maintenance planning (VDMP), to emphasise the fact that the objectives of the plant are the reference points for specifying functional requirements for the equipment locations and equipment.The three basic phases of the VDMP planning approach are:(i)the definition of the fundamental, strategic and maintenance (means) objectives of the production plant,(ii)the classification of equipment locations (including one or several equipment items) into maintenance classes, each associated with a functional requirement specification, and(iii)the selection of maintenance strategies and maintenance tasks (including timing) for equipment assigned to the equipment locations.Feedback of the operational experience is crucial for the application of the maintenance planning approach. As a consequence, the approach is developed to support the continuous improvement of the cost effectiveness of maintenance rather than planning of the initial maintenance programme of a new plant. Analysis techniques are presented and challenges of application are discussed. The application of the VDMP approach to a gasification plant in Finland is also presented.