The purpose of this paper is to develop a preventive maintenance (PM) model that encounters the problems of traditional methods of conducting PM within high component/machine variety environments.
A new platform to conduct planning of the PM actions by using clustering based on the Group Technology concept to create PM virtual cells of equipment/machines is introduced. A real case study at Arab Potash Company was used to illustrate the model. The component/machine variety that requires PM at the considered company is in thousands of items.
PM for high component/machine environments are not enough addressed in the literature. The concept of clustering and similarity coefficient was used and found very useful to model this situation.
The proposed procedure will assist maintenance managers/engineers in too many ways. It will help to optimize the inventory of the spare parts, and to create standard process plan for executing the preventive maintenance operation.
This paper presents a new procedure to implement preventive maintenance in high component/machine environments using clustering technique concept. Models that address this concept are rare and very limited in the literature.
