Researchers Catch-up - Venue Curtin University Building 216 Innovation Centre Collaboration Area.

Refineries take particular care in determining the maintenance strategy for assets that sit on the critical path of production.  Failures in these assets can cause significant losses in production.  A common strategy for critical asset maintenance is to provide surplus, or redundant, assets that can replace a critical asset requiring maintenance.  However, this strategy is further complicated when the assets are interconnected, and maintenance activities are governed by hard scheduling constraints. 

In this presentation I present a maintenance optimisation model for a network of digester banks, a critical path asset found in the Bayer process.  I will outline the formulation of the model, as well as the real-world considerations required.  Finally, I will present a new solution algorithm designed to solve the model and determine the optimal maintenance schedule.