Abstract
This paper employs a mathematical model to improve the effectiveness of preventive maintenance. The study focuses on using real data of a feed pump (FP) in a petroleum refinery plant to test the effectiveness of the PM model and its impact on both reliability and maintainability. The model is tested for different scenarios by changing one of the main variables each time. These scenarios are developed using different values of failure rate to determine the steady state probability at normal operation. This will allow obtaining the best scheduling time for PM and improving the reliability of the feed pump. The timing of the preventive maintenance is essential to reduce system failure and corrective maintenance. The model helps to find good and decisive time, when the preventive maintenance work is superior rather than having a corrective action to repair the feed pump. This model supports the plant for sustainability and cost effectiveness with good timing and effective PM. Therefore, at high failure rate the probability of the Feed Pump failure will increase. In this case the availability of the Feed Pump will decrease, indicating that there is a need to perform PM works on the system. The results show that the life span of the system is extended with proposed PM model. Accordingly, increasing the reliability will increase the operational life cycle by reducing failures during operations, hence reducing the total costs by improving the availability.