Combined maintenance scheduling and production optimization
Résumé
Optimal operation of complex production and processing plants is important, but challenging to achieve in practice. The reason for this is that decisions in different disciplines, such as design, operations and maintenance, are made independently of each other. This can lead to a large degree of conservativeness. In this paper, we present a unified approach for maintenance- and production planning, which reduces the conservativeness and leads to more economical operation. We model the system using differential equations and then formulate the problem of optimal operation as a numerical optimization problem. The problem is a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC), which we solve using off-the-shelf optimization software. Some model approximations were made to make the system numerically tractable. We demonstrate the method on a subsea-inspired case example.