An approach for mastering Carbon Footprint in the context of Distributed Maintenance

This paper deals with the carbon footprint of distributed maintenance operations. It concerns the maintenance scheduling of a set of geographically distributed production sites where pieces of equipment are subject to failure. Their health state is monitored by a central maintenance workshop (CMW), which plans the corresponding preventive maintenance (PM) tasks and repairs defective equipment. A mobile maintenance workshop (MMW) transports all the resources necessary to maintain each piece of equipment, following the predefined schedule. This study aims to propose an approach to reducing CO2 emissions of the MMW routing. The model allows choosing the optimal position of the CMW and the capacity of vehicles, both satisfying a low cost and a low carbon footprint. We conduct several experiments from a real-world case study and European Union (EU) regulation. The results show a trade-off between operational profitability and strategic sustainability.