Availability and maintenance cost optimization of a production plant

Discusses the relationship between plant availability and maintenance expenditure and their limiting features. Achieving higher plant availability always necessitates a higher maintenance budget and may not be economically feasible in many cases. Through a mathematical modelling the variation of net income with respect to plant availability has been studied and the limiting availability values have been established. Expressions for optimum availability and maintenance cost have also been obtained. An illustrative example has been worked out.