A decision support system for maintenance planning of printing machinery

Abstract

The decision support system for maintenance planning aims to support a manager in making and selecting the suitable maintenance plans for the printing machinery. The decision support system software is developed to be the prototype software for applying in the maintenance planning of the offset-type printing machinery. The process in developing the sofware is consisted of three stages: the definition, the design, and the implementation. The definition stage is used for building the decision models of the system. The knowledge and information regarding the maintenance planning are collected from the experts and the textbooks. The design stage is used to create the system architecture and components. These components are the dialog, the data, the model, and the knowledge base. The implementation stage is used to build the system software from the designed structure and components. After developing the software, the system is implemented to the maintenance of the printing machinery. The data of the past maintenance failure records and the production schedule are used to simulate the situations for running the software. The purposes of implementation are to evaluate the capabilities of the software and to find the limits and errors of the software for improvement. The results of the implementation are the maintenance plans and the performance indexes. These values are used to indicate the capabilities of the software in setting the maintenance plan. The capabilities of the software can be categorized into thre main functions. These are to recommend the suitable maintenance tasks for the maintenance planning, to plan and schedule the maintenance tasks, and to summarize and calculate the maintenance costs and indexes for measuring the maintenance performance.