Mathematical Maintenance Model for Medical Equipment
Résumé
Although medical equipment maintenance has been well planned and executed for more than 30 years, very few studies have been conducted to measure and evaluate its effectiveness in terms of reliability and availability for service delivery. The ongoing unresolved debate in clinical engineering is whether preventive maintenance (PM) is actually necessary and, if so, how often and which tasks need to be performed. A mathematical maintenance modelling approach is used to analyse the survival probability of various medical equipment. This approach allows exploring the impact of PM, CM and combined PM/CM on the availability of equipment and will contribute to the intensified debate regarding PM. Maintenance strategies is analysed and a new failure-cost model was developed, which allows adopting appropriate PM intervals for various types of medical equipment. The analytical model to calculate the number of failures and costs associated with PM and CM is a significant contribution. The optimisation problem related to preventive maintenance scheduling using a Mixed-Integer Mathematical Programming solver was solved and compared to a proposed Greedy Algorithm.