A Hybrid Simulation Study to Determine an Optimal Maintenance Strategy

With the increasing complexity of the process industry, having excellent maintenance management is essential for manufacturing industries. Various parts that interact and interdependent with each other make a well-planned maintenance strategy is one of the major challenges faced by industry. The whole system could be interrupted just simply because of the failure of a component. Therefore, a review of a maintenance strategy must be done from a system perspective. It is suggested that the optimal preventive maintenance time interval is not only determined by the lowest maintenance cost of each machine but also its impact on the whole system. Two main indicators that can accommodate the system perspective are reliability and revenue. A large number of machines and the array of machines can be synthesized using reliability indicators. Moreover, the creation of maximum revenue is always the main goal for a business. Therefore, in this study, the best maintenance strategy will be determined from the revenue obtained by a process industry which operates a well known flour mill in Surabaya. A hybrid approach is proposed using Monte Carlo simulation to observe the machine individually from which the results are reviewed using the application of System Dynamics. From three improvement scenarios, a scenario 2 with a recommendation of setting the preventive maintenance time interval considering resource availability, was finally chosen because it was able to generate the highest revenue at the end of the period