Discussion of the paper "Application of maintenance optimization models: a review and analysis" written by R. Dekker (ePub)

Scientific Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 19,5/20, University of Rennes 1, language: English, abstract: Maintenance management and optimization of maintenance is getting more and more important for a large number of companies. The use of automated machines and equip-ment in order to produce goods is very common today; hence companies have to rely on reliable machines which are available and working 100% of the time. In order to attain a flawless working factory, maintenance management is crucial. However companies cannot hope that the decisions they make concerning maintenance management are optimal and they start therefore to use decision support systems based on optimization methods. Also maintenance management is very complex and a lot of different decisions have to be made, like defining maintenance intervals, personal planning, when to buy spare parts, when to replace equipment etc. It is easier for companies to base their decisions on a mathematical program, and therefore the use of maintenance management optimization models arises. Optimization models proved to be very advantageous in other sectors, so it was just a matter of time before optimization methods where ported to maintenance man-agement. Problematic in the case of maintenance optimization are the very specific maintenance problems resulting in a large number of different maintenance optimization models. It is consequently very difficult to get a good overview about the different models and their application.
R. Dekker, who has worked a lot on maintenance optimization and on operations research in maintenance management wrote a paper about maintenance optimization methods and their application, 'Application of maintenance optimization models: a review and analysis'. It summarizes maintenance management in general, gives a brief history of maintenance management, describes different optimization methods, their practical application, problems which can occur by applying the models etc.
In this paper, I will discuss the work of R. Dekker; first of all there will be a description of the paper, explaining what it is about and giving a resume of important aspects. In the second section, the paper will be compared to other papers concerning maintenance opti-mization, different and identical aspects will be explained. Furthermore some information will be added in order to simplify the comprehension of maintenance optimization mod-els. Finally I will comment the paper, and give my opinion about the aspects that I liked and what I would describe differently.