Searching for Gas Turbine Maintenance Schedules

Preventive-maintenance schedules occurring in industry are often suboptimal with regard to maintenance coallocation, loss-of-production costs, and availability. We describe the implementation and deployment of a software decision support tool for the maintenance planning of gas turbines, with the goal of reducing the direct maintenance costs and the often costly production losses during maintenance down time. The optimization problem is formally defined, and we argue that the feasibility version is NPcomplete. We outline a heuristic algorithm that can quickly solve the problem for practical purposes and validate the approach on a real-world scenario based on an oil production facility. We also compare the performance of our algorithm with results from using integer programming and discuss the deployment of the application.