Opportunistic Strategy for Maintenance Interventions Planning: A Case Study in a Wastewater Treatment Plant

Featured Application: The application potential includes any sewage treatment system that makes use of preventive maintenance plans for highly critical assets, and requires the utilization of an optimized grouping strategy to improve the availability of the components involved. Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) face two fundamental challenges: on the one hand, they must ensure an efficient application of preventive maintenance plans for their survival under competitive environments; and on the other hand, they must simultaneously comply with the requirements of reliability, maintainability, and safety of their operations, ensuring environmental care and the quality of their effluents for human consumption. In this sense, this article seeks to propose a cost-efficient alternative for the execution of preventive maintenance (PM) plans through the formulation and optimization of the opportunistic grouping strategy with time-window tolerances and non-negligible execution times. The proposed framework is applied to a PM plan for critical high-risk activities, addressing primary treatment and anaerobic sludge treatment process in a wastewater treatment plant. Results show a 26% system inefficiency reduction versus the initial maintenance plan, demonstrating the capacity of the framework to increase the availability of the assets and reduce maintenance interruptions of the WWTP under analysis.

Automated summary

This article presents an optimized grouping strategy for wastewater treatment plants to increase asset availability and reduce maintenance interruptions, resulting in a reduction of system inefficiency.