Integrating Maintenance into Long Term Planning

Abstract

Asset management can be regarded as managing the degradation of assets by means of timing of interventions. Basically two types of interventions exist, maintaining or replacing the asset. In practice, maintenance and replacement are often optimized independently, as the timeframes and costs involved are often very different. Only at the end of asset life the disciplines connect in the choice between maintaining and replacing the asset. However, as maintenance impacts asset life, in long term planning of the asset base both should be considered in coherence. In this paper we present our simplified marginal approach for integrating maintenance in long term replacement planning considerations. The results are compared with numerical optimization by means of life cycle costing. Although the results align in general, there may be cases that a marginal approach does not provide the right result. The conditions under which this happens will require further research.