COMERT Research Project

Coupling Maintenance Optimisation and Technician Routing

Group : Dynamic Systems and Optimization

Labelling: none

Duration: 12 months (09/16/2020 - 09/15/2021)

Funding: RFI Atlanstic2020 and CIRRELT

Staff involved from LARIS: Christelle Guéret, Bruno Castanier, Florian Delavernhe (Post-doctoral researcher)

Project partners: Jorge Mendoza (Professor at IVAGO-HEC Montréal/CIRRELT)

Résumé

The challenge of maintenance optimization consists in finding the right compromise between maintenance costs and availability of production systems. Numerous studies focus on the modeling of industrial system maintenance, including predictive maintenance that integrates a maximum amount of information on the health of the system. Other lines of research are linked to a global optimization of maintenance, including the management of maintenance resources, which is particularly relevant in a framework of geo-dispersed systems. At the same time, work is being done in the operational research community to optimize maintenance technician routing in order to minimize travel costs. However, the work of these two communities is mostly conducted independently of each other.

This project aims to address the problem of maintenance of geographically distributed production systems from both a maintenance optimization and a vehicle route optimization perspective. We consider in this project a group of technicians with different skills who have to visit different production sites with different machines. The objective is to define maintenance strategies and to build the associated technician routes in such a way as to minimize a global cost integrating the costs of machine unavailability, risk of breakdowns and transportation.