A joint selective maintenance and multiple repair-person assignment problem

It is common in many industrial settings to have large multicomponent systems perform consecutive missions interspersed with finite breaks during which a limited set of component repairs or replacements can be carried out due to limited time, budget, or resources. The decision maker then has to decide which components to repair in order to guarantee a pre-specified performance level. This is known as the selective maintenance problem. This paper introduces a novel variant of the selective maintenance problem for a multi-component system performing consecutive missions separated by scheduled finite breaks by specifically modelling the assignment of the repair tasks to multiple repair-persons. Current models in the literature usually assume that only one repair channel is available or that the assignment optimization can be done at a subsequent stage. A novel integrated nonlinear programming formulation is proposed and optimally solved. Numerical experiments show the benefits of jointly carrying out the assignment of the tasks to repair-persons and the selection of the components to be repaired.