Maintenance policy optimization—literature review and directions

Numerous of maintenance policies were developed due to the change in the manufacturing environment and the growing of technologies in the past few decades. Due to fluctuation (oscillation, instability) phenomena of the manufacturing industry, it is difficult to identify an optimal maintenance policy that actually suit for a manufacturing system. Thus, a lot of efforts have been done in order to assist manufacturing industry in finding an optimal maintenance policy. This paper attempts to review past and current research on optimal maintenance policy selection issues associated with methods used as well as the applications. Published literatures were systematically classified based on certainty theory in operation management classification model in term of certainty, uncertainty, and risk. Furthermore, a sub family had been classified based on the approaches used in determining the optimal maintenance policy. The possible gap occurred between academic research and industrial application in maintenance policy optimization is also discussed in detail, and several possible ideas are put forward to reduce the gap. More importantly, the paper is intended to provide a different view on classifying these models and give useful references for personnel working in industrial as well as researchers.