3. Choosing a maintenance policy

The main objective of maintenance policy is economic efficiency, often coupled with safety imperatives and regulatory constraints (e.g. anti-pollution standards). Once these constraints have been identified, the choice of maintenance policy is determined by calculating the overall life cycle cost.

In the long term, the first step is to judge the optimum service life of a machine by estimating the sum of the following costs:

• purchase cost A ;

• operating cost F ;

• total maintenance cost M ;

• eventual resale value RV.

The total cost is :

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