Multiyear Facility Maintenance Optimization

Abstract

Facility maintenance decisions are essential to ensuring infrastructure can continue to meet mission objectives. To keep facilities and equipment operational during budget shortfalls, sometimes myopic maintenance strategies are used due to their immediate benefits despite their longer-term suboptimal effects on facility health. This effect is even more pronounced when making maintenance plans across multiyear horizons. Often, these multiyear effects require nonlinear modeling to capture their complex interactions. This paper explains how to frame such a scenario as a linear programming problem by utilizing a degradation model and a predefined set of maintenance actions, like repairing, replacing, or performing no maintenance on a component. Translating to a linear program has many benefits, like guaranteed optimality and shorter computation times. Case studies show how this approach improves outcomes across different scopes, ranging from a single facility to a portfolio of facilities. The results show significantly better utilization of resources in terms of the resulting Building Condition Index for the same budget.