Grouping of Activities for Improving Maintenance Planning

This paper presents a framework for improving maintenance planning in industrial facilities based on an opportunistic approach of grouping maintenance activities. The framework proposes a visual decomposition of the facility into subsystems combined with its maintenance activities to incorporate the functional dependencies of equipment in the planning of maintenance. The proposed framework is based on principles from Theory of Technical Systems and Product Architectures combined with opportunistic maintenance.The main motivation for developing the framework is the current limitations in opportunistic maintenance on complex facilities. The literature stresses the importance of improving synergies between maintenance activities to reduce production loss and set-up costs. However, when dealing with complex facilities, it becomes more complicated to apply methods within opportunistic maintenance and capture these synergies.To support this, a framework for connecting the physical aspects with its maintenance activities is developed based on a deductive approach. The framework creates a baseline for opportunistic maintenance planning and proposes two opportunistic procedures: (1) grouping of maintenance activities requiring the same shutdowns and (2) grouping of both preventive maintenance (PM) and corrective maintenance (CM) activities. The framework contributes to the overall understanding of opportunities in the grouping maintenance activities on complex facilities, by providing a visual overview of the functional dependencies within the facility.The framework is applied to a case study within a global oil and gas exploration and production company, where the two procedures of grouping maintenance activities are validated. The first procedure identifies a great potential of reducing the total days of shutdowns and the second procedure identifies a great potential of savings in set-up costs and man-hours.