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Spare parts
Application of data mining for information in
spare parts information in maintenance
schedule
maintenance schedule: a case study
U.C. Moharana, S.P. Sarmah and Pradeep Kumar Rathore 1055
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering,
Received 13 September 2018
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India Revised 28 December 2018
8 February 2019
21 February 2019
Abstract Accepted 22 February 2019

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to suggest a framework for extracting the sequential patterns of
maintenance activities and related spare parts information from historical records of maintenance data with
pre-defined support or threshold values.
Design/methodology/approach – A data mining approach has been adopted for predicting the
maintenance activity along with spare parts. It starts with a collection of spare parts and maintenance data,
and then the development of sequential patterns followed by formation of frequent spare part groups, and
finally, integration of sequential maintenance activities with the associated spare parts.
Findings – This study suggests a framework for extracting the sequential patterns of maintenance activities
from historical records of maintenance data with pre-defined support or threshold values. A rule-based
approach is proposed in this paper to predict the occurrence of next maintenance activity along with the
information of spare parts consumption for that maintenance activity.
Research limitations/implications – Presented model can be extended for analyzing the failure
maintenance activities and performing root cause analysis that can give more valuable suggestion to
maintenance managers to take corrective actions prior to next occurrence of failures. In addition, the
timestamp information can be utilized to prioritize the maintenance activity that is ignored in this study.
Practical implications – The proposed model has a high potential for industrial applications and is validated
through a case study. The study suggests that the model gives a better approach for selecting spare parts based
on their similarity or correlation, considering their actual occurrence during maintenance activities. Apart from
this, the clustering of spare parts also trains maintenance manager to learn about the dependency among the
spares for group stocking and maintaining the parts availability during maintenance activities.
Originality/value – This study has used the technique of data mining to find dependent spare parts itemset
from the database of the company and developed the model for associated spare parts requirement for
subsequent maintenance activity.
Keywords Data mining, Case study, Maintenance management, Association rule, Sequential pattern
Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction
On many occasions, the sudden failure of one part of an equipment can lead to subsequent
failures of other parts in the system. Ignoring this failure information may lead to an
increase in downtime and the cost of next maintenance activity. One can prevent downtime
by just replacing the failed part at the correct time. However, by acquiring this knowledge, a
maintenance manager can take necessary actions to prevent the occurrence of similar issues
in the future by maintaining a proper corrective maintenance schedule. It is observed that
many industries face problems regarding the scheduling and predicting the sequence of
maintenance activities along with the usage of parts during the corrective maintenance of
their equipment. For example, in the case of open cast mining industry, heavy types of
equipment such as bucket wheel excavator, spreader, tripper car, conveyors, etc., are
employed in different areas of mining locations. Maintenance activities of this equipment in
Journal of Manufacturing
actual working locations are difficult in terms of predicting the sequence and requirement of Technology Management
different types of spare parts with their quantities. In such cases, the industry faces huge Vol. 30 No. 7, 2019
pp. 1055-1072
production downtime situations and also incurs an extra cost due to increased frequency of © Emerald Publishing Limited
1741-038X
transporting spares from stores to maintenance locations. Therefore, there is a need to learn DOI 10.1108/JMTM-09-2018-0303
JMTM the sequence of maintenance activities performed on equipment and their approximate
30,7 usage of spare parts. This process will reduce the downtime activities by knowing the
occurrence of the next maintenance activity and the requirement of related spare parts.
A data mining technique (sequential pattern mining technique) can be a better approach for
extracting the sequences and predicting the number of spare parts to be used and this has
motivated us to take up the present work.
1056 Sequential pattern mining approach searches relations or patterns among data objects
over the time periods that are captured in the database. The records of daily maintenance
activity are captured in the maintenance database of the company with timestamp
information. The usual maintenance transaction has important attributes such as
maintenance number, date of maintenance, equipment number, equipment sub-section
number, maintenance type, spare parts used, the quantity of spare parts, spare parts cost,
labor cost, etc. Using this information, one can find out the relationship between the
activities of today’s maintenance and the actions to be performed for the next period’s
maintenance. Sometimes, this process is also useful for unearthing the lowest time gap
between the same maintenance activities due to faulty maintenance work done initially.
In this paper, a sequential pattern mining algorithm is applied to a maintenance data set
collected from a large maintenance database of a mining company. Initially, the time-interval
frequent sequential patterns are extracted using the support or threshold values. In the second
part, we generated sequential rules from the frequent pattern and proposed a rule-based
classification approach to predict the occurrence of the next maintenance activities. Finally, in
the third step, the spare parts codes are mapped according to the discovered sequential
maintenance activities. To the best of our knowledge, prior literature has not discussed the
application of sequential data mining technique particularly for maintenance sequence and
management of spare parts and thereby this work contributes to the body of knowledge.

2. Related literature
In the maintenance management literature, several authors have applied data mining
techniques for achieving various goals such as predicting maintenance intervals, fault
detection, prioritizing equipment, predicting failure probability, identifying the cause of
failure, fault trends, etc. In this brief review of the literature, initially, for the ease of the reader,
a short discussion is made about itemset mining that is the basis for any data mining
activities. In data mining, discovering frequent pattern or itemset is an important process for
performing other activities such as association rule mining (ARM), classification, prediction,
clustering, etc. (Köksal et al., 2011). The popular approaches such as Apriori-like algorithms
(Agrawal et al., 1993) and pattern growth methods are often adopted for finding frequent
itemsets from large databases. These approaches assume all items as binary variables
considering whether they are consumed or bought or not. Agrawal and Srikant (1995)
introduced three different Apriori algorithms like AprioriAll, AprioriSome and DynamicSome.
They described a sequential pattern mining problem for finding the frequent sequences of
items that should qualify user-specified minimum support. Later, a few researchers proposed
an extension of itemset mining called itemset mining with quantities considering the
consumption of item along with quantity (Srikant and Agrawal, 1996). Other researchers have
studied weighted itemset mining considering the occurrence of the item along with its weight
or importance (Yun and Leggett, 2005). Sun and Bai (2008) suggested a weighted mining
approach without pre-assigning of weights. Vo et al. (2013) proposed an algorithm based on
WIT-trees for fast mining of frequent weighted itemset. Lan et al. (2014) suggested an
approach for finding the weighted sequential pattern. Later on, few more researchers
proposed some more algorithms for fast mining of weighted itemset (Prost-Boucle et al., 2017;
Dang and Skadron, 2017; Nguyen, 2018). The next process of data mining is ARM; it uses the
frequent itemsets and discovers the associations among the items/itemsets. The significance
and strength of association rule are measured by rule support and confidence values that are Spare parts
greater than the threshold values. Next, a brief discussion is made about the literature related information in
to the application of data mining in maintenance management. maintenance
Choudhary et al. (2009) presented a text mining approach using abstract and keywords
of 150 research papers and revealed that only 8 percent of data mining studies cover the schedule
area of maintenance. Batanov et al. (1993) proposed a rule-based system for maintenance
management to diagnose the maintenance model selection. The model analyzed 1057
the historical failure data and recommended an appropriate policy with optimal
corrective maintenance intervals. Letourneau et al. (1999) proposed a data mining model that
handles the issues like data gathering, data labeling, and data and model integration. They
used the Naïve Bays, decision tree, and instance-based model for predicting aircraft
component replacement. Meseroll et al. (2007) used data mining application on navy flight
maintenance data to discover the causes of how and why the components fail in aircraft,
which is a complex equipment. They mentioned that this model could be helpful for
facilitating the identification of non-trivial system failure modes. As per Cai et al. (2008), the
aircraft industry produces a large amount of failure data and more effort is required to predict
the failure probability and optimum maintenance strategy like when or how the failure
occurred. To overcome this problem, the authors proposed Bayesian networks approach to
discover associations among failure data that is helpful for predicting the failure probability
and balance the resource availability, repair effect, cost, and product risk. Based on
association rules concept, Young et al. (2010) analyzed the aircraft maintenance data and
discovered the parameters link failures, diagnoses and repair actions for enhancing
maintenance practices. Fei et al. (2010) analyzed equipment maintenance data and extracted a
large number of maintenance models from historical data and then used this information to
train the backpropagation (BP) neural network model for predicting the maintenance
intervals. They showed that their method gives 27.1 percent average relative error in
prediction and is an efficient model for handling dynamic maintenance intervals. Baohui
et al. (2011) used historical aircraft maintenance data along with extracted association rules
among faults and different maintenance measures at the various levels of the aircraft system.
Al-Naimal and Al-Timemy (2010) suggested a neural network-based prediction model for
assessing the risk priority of medical equipment. They used a back-propagation neural
network model with a prediction accuracy of 96 percent. Their model is capable of predicting
the risk factor assessment for the service departments in large hospitals. Similarly, Kamsu-
Foguem et al. (2013) suggested ARM for the improvement of the quality of the production
process and Xu et al. (2014) suggested for tunnel maintenance. Djatna and Alitu (2015) applied
the ARM in the implementation of total productive maintenance on a wooden door
manufacturing company. Xiao et al. (2016) provided Bayesian Networks-based association
rules for decision making of maintenance in industrial product-service systems. In the
following paragraph, the literature related to sequential pattern mining is discussed that is the
focus of the present study.
In the last two decades, the sequential pattern mining technique is extensively used by
researchers in various directions such as biological sequence mining, incremental sequence
mining, multi-dimensional sequence pattern mining and approximate sequence mining in a
noisy environment (Yun, 2007). Several researchers proposed efficient algorithms for
sequential pattern mining from a large database. The performance problem is the main
issue for sequential pattern mining. Hence, over the period of time, researchers have
improved performance by adding some constraints to the mining process. There are many
researchers who have contributed to constrained sequential mining. Yun (2007) used weight
constraints to reduce the number of insignificant patterns. Similarly, Chen et al. (2008)
proposed a mining model by incorporating user-defined constraints for discovering
knowledge to satisfy the user need in a better way. Masseglia et al. (2008) used the GSP
JMTM algorithm for discovering sequential patterns with time constraints and proposed a new
30,7 efficient algorithm called the Graph Time Constraints algorithm for mining patterns in large
databases. Chang (2011) proposed a methodology for extracting weighted sequential
patterns considering time interval weight. The author has given priority to the small time
intervals than large time intervals (small interval gets more weight as compared to large
interval) using different weighting functions and observed that the proposed weighted
1058 mining approach is efficient and helpful for generating more interesting patterns.
From the above literature review, it is observed that till date, the sequential pattern
mining technique is not applied by any researchers in the maintenance activities for
subsequent management of spare parts. In this paper, we have made an attempt to bridge
this gap in the literature. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 3, the
procedure for mining sequential patterns and discovering the sequential rules is described
with examples. The proposed framework for mining the sequential maintenance activities
and spare parts mapping is described in Section 4. In Section 5, an industrial case study is
presented to illustrate the proposed framework. The results and analysis of the case study
are also made in the same section. Finally, conclusion and scope for further research work
are provided in Section 6.

3. Background of the work

Here, a brief discussion is made about sequential pattern mining and sequential rules for
the ease of understanding of the work by the reader. A sequence database consists of
sequences of ordered elements or events recorded with or without timestamp information.
Let I ¼ {I1, I2, I3, …, Ip} be the set of all items, and sequence s is written as 〈e1, e2, e3, …, en〉
that is the set of all events. In the sequence s, e2 occurs after e1, and e3 occurs after e2 and so
on. One event can consist of one item or multiple items in the transaction. Considering the
example given in Table I, if x ¼ 〈a,(a, b, c)〉 and y ¼ 〈(b, c)〉 are two sequences, then x is
called a super-sequence of y. A sequence is called a sequential pattern or frequent
sequential pattern when computed support value of the sequence is greater than or equal
to a threshold value. Referring to Han and Kamber (2006), in a sequence database S that is
a set of tuples 〈SID, s〉 where SID is the sequence id and s is the sequence. If 〈SID, s〉
contains a sequence α, then α is called a sub-sequence of s. The support value of the
sequence α is given as follows:
 
 hSI D; sijðhSI D; si A S Þ4ðaDsÞ 
SuppS ðaÞ ¼   :
 hSI D; sijðhSI D; siA S Þ 

For understanding, let us take the example given in Table I.

In the literature, many popular algorithms are used for mining sequential pattern such as
Generalized Sequential Pattern (GSP) (Srikant and Agrawal, 1996), Apriori-Based Vertical
Data Format Sequential Pattern Mining (SPADE) (Zaki, 2000), Sequential Pattern Mining
(SPAM) (Ayres et al., 2002) and PrefixSpan (Pei et al., 2001). We have used the PrefixSpan
algorithm in our example to demonstrate the generation of sequential patterns.

Sequence ID Sequence

10 o a, (a, b, c), (a, c), d, (c, f ) W

Table I. 20 o (a, d), c, (b, c), (a, e) W
Example of a 30 o (e, f ), (a, b), (d, f ), c, bW
sequence database 40 o e, g, (a, f ), c, b, cW
It is observed that considering one sequence, eight sequential patterns (o(a)W,o(a, b)W, Spare parts
o(b)W,o(b, c)W,o(c)W,o(d)W,o(e)W ando( f )W) are generated from 17 possible information in
patterns with minimum support of 50 percent as shown in Table II. Similarly, 25, 18, 2 frequent maintenance
sequential patterns are generated for two sequences (likeo(a), ( f )W), three sequences (like
o(a, b), (d), (c)W) and four sequences (likeo(e), ( f ), (c), (b)W) combinations, respectively. schedule
As one can see in the above example, there is no time information in the sequence database.
But time stamp information is important for identifying the intervals among the events in 1059
sequential pattern mining. For example, suppose a customer buys a computer today, and just
after one month, the same customer visits the retail store to buy a printer. A model was proposed
by Hirate and Yamana (2006) considering time constraints from time-extended sequences. An
example is given here to illustrate the sequential pattern mining process with time interval
information. The same sequence of data is used by including the time stamp information. The
authors have defined the following constraints for mining time extended sequences:
• Minsup: minimum number of sequences should contain sequential pattern.
• MinInterval: minimum interval allowed between two successive events.
• MaxInterval: maximum interval allowed between two successive events.
• MinWholeInterval: minimum interval allowed between the first event and last event.
• MaxWholeInterval: maximum interval allowed between the first event and last event.
Considering the data set given in Table III and Minsup ¼ 55 percent, MinInterval ¼ 0,
MaxInterval ¼ 2, MinWholeInterval ¼ 0 and MaxWholeInterval ¼ 2, the snap shot of
extracted sequential patterns are given in Table IV.

Patterns Sequence Support (%) Frequent/infrequent

Pattern 1 o(a)W 100 Frequent

Pattern 2 o(a, e) W 25 Infrequent
Pattern 3 o(a, d)W 25 Infrequent
Pattern 4 o(a, f )W 25 Infrequent
Pattern 5 o(a, c) W 25 Infrequent
Pattern 6 o(a, b)W 50 Frequent
Pattern 7 o(a, b, c) W 25 Infrequent
Pattern 8 o(b)W 100 Frequent
Pattern 9 o(b, c) W 50 Frequent
Pattern 10 o(c) W 100 Frequent
Pattern 11 o(c, f )W 25 Infrequent
Pattern 12 o(d) W 75 Frequent
Pattern 13 o(d, f )W 25 Infrequent
Pattern 14 o(e) W 75 Frequent
Pattern 15 o(e, f )W 25 Infrequent Table II.
Pattern 16 o( f )W 75 Frequent Sequential patterns
Pattern 17 o(g) W 25 Infrequent for one sequence

Sequence ID Sequence Time stamp

10 o a, (a, b, c), (a, c)W o0, 1, 2W

20 o a, (a, b), (a, b, c), (a, b, c) W o0, 1, 2, 3 W Table III.
30 o (a, b), (a, b)W o0, 1W Sequence database
40 o b, (a, b, c) W o0, 1W with time information
JMTM 4. Development of the proposed model
30,7 The objective of the proposed model is to integrate sequential maintenance patterns with
their frequent group of spare parts. Here, we have described the framework of the proposed
model like the collection of maintenance data, sequential patterns generation, frequent
spares group generation, integrating sequential maintenance activities with associated
spare parts. The framework of the model is given in Figure 1, and Figure 2 describes the
1060 time interval sequence of maintenance activities and the corresponding spare parts.

4.1 Collection of maintenance data

Usually, the maintenance data comprises of different attributes like location, equipment
number, equipment sub-section number, type of maintenance, maintenance start date,
maintenance finish date, spare parts used, quantities of spare parts, spare parts cost, labor
cost, failure description, repair or replacement description, etc. This information is stored in
a maintenance database that is also connected to integrated material management or
enterprise resource planning (ERP) database of a company. The data cleaning process
removes the junk records or orphan records that are entered by the users erroneously or due
to a system error. After cleaning, a separate database table or view is created to store these
clean data for further data mining activities for classification, prediction or trend analysis.

4.2 Finding sequential patterns

As discussed in Section 3, only maintenance date information for single equipment is used for
extracting the sequential patterns. The complexity of generating the itemsets or pattern
combination increases once the number of items increases. In case of sequential pattern
mining, the possible number of patterns using GSP mining (Srikant and Agrawal, 1996) are
n2 + n(n − 1)/2 where n is the number of items present in the database. For example, 51 total
numbers of patterns can be generated using six items with length 1. In this case, the Apriori
algorithm is used in GSP to prune the set of candidates. In our study, we have used sequential
maintenance activities with a time stamp as time information gives more practical usage in
maintenance as compared to sequences with no time information. The pattern is called a
sequential or frequent sequential pattern when the support of the sequence is more than or
equal to threshold support values. For time-interval sequences, four more threshold values like
MinInterval, MaxInterval, MinWholeInterval and MaxWholeInterval (defined in section 3) are
used along with Minsupp values. In our studies, we have assumed these thresholds, generated
the sequential patterns and compared the results with different threshold values. But in the
real case, these values are to be suggested by decision makers or experts.

4.3 Generating sequential rules

Once the sequential pattern is generated, the next process is to generate sequential
association rules among the itemsets. Similar Apriori algorithm is used for generating the

Patterns Sequence Support (%) Patterns Sequence Support (%)

Pattern 1 ot ¼ 0, (c) W 75 Pattern 10 o {t ¼ 0, (b)}, {t ¼ 1, (a, c)} W 75

Pattern 2 ot ¼ 0, (b, c)W 75 Pattern 11 o {t ¼ 0, (b)}, {t ¼ 1, (a)}W 100
Pattern 3 ot ¼ 0, (b) W 100 Pattern 12 o {t ¼ 0, (b)}, {t ¼ 1, (b)} W 75
Pattern 4 ot ¼ 0, (a, b, c)W 75 Pattern 13 o {t ¼ 0, (a)}, {t ¼ 1, (a, b)} W 75
Pattern 5 ot ¼ 0, (a, b) W 100 Pattern 14 o {t ¼ 0, (a)}, {t ¼ 1, (a)}W 75
Table IV. Pattern 6 ot ¼ 0, (a, c) W 75 Pattern 15 o {t ¼ 0, (a)}, {t ¼ 1, (b)} W 75
Extracted frequent Pattern 7 ot ¼ 0, (a) W 100 Pattern 16 o {t ¼ 0, (a, b)}, {t ¼ 1, (a)}W 75
sequential patterns Pattern 8 o{t ¼ 0, (b)}, {t ¼ 1, (c)} W 75 Pattern 11 o {t ¼ 0, (b)}, {t ¼ 1, (a)}W 100
with time information Pattern 9 o{t ¼ 0, (b)}, {t ¼ 1, (a, b)} W 75 Pattern 12 o {t ¼ 0, (b)}, {t ¼ 1, (b)} W 75
 Start
Spare parts
information in
Collect maintenance
maintenance
records of a specific
equipment
schedule

1061
Arrange the sequential Generate all possible groups of
maintenance transactions associated spare parts specific
weekly basis to maintenance activities

Search for another group

Generate all possible Is the

No
patterns of events group
significant?

Yes
Is the Report it as frequent Collect all frequent
pattern Yes
group groups
significant?

No

Report it as sequential Collect all sequential

Search for another
pattern patterns
pattern

Generate sequential
rules
All valid rules

Search for another rule Compute rule support, confidence,

lift and 2 values Map spare part
Rule-based prediction
groups to sequential
of test data
patterns
Figure 1.
Is the rule Sequential pattern
No
significant? Yes
mining framework for
End maintenance activities

T1 T2 T3
M01 M02 M03 M04 

S11 S21 S31 S41

S12 S22 S32 S42  Figure 2.
S13 S23 S33 S43 Sequence of
… … … … maintenance activities
… … … … and associated
spare parts

association rules. Usually, the rule consists of two components called antecedent or
condition and consequent or conclusion part. It is written as IF-THEN expressions like IF x
THEN y or x ⇒ y. The rule is evaluated using different statistical measures like rule support,
confidence, lift and χ2 values. The details of these measures are referred to Azevedo and
Jorge (2007) and given as follows.
JMTM 4.3.1 Rule support. Rule support is defined as the percent of objects (both X and Y)
30,7 among all transactions that correspond to a rule:

jX [Y j
SU P ðX ) Y Þ ¼ :
jD j

1062
This is a symmetric measure as SUP(X)⇒Y) ¼ SUP(Y ⇒X). Rules are called frequent rules
when SU P ðX ) Y ÞXM inSup that is a user specified threshold value.
4.3.2 Rule confidence. The confidence of the rule is defined as the conditional probability
that a transaction contains Y given that it contains X:

jX [Y j
CON F ðX ) Y Þ ¼
jX j

The rule is interesting when CON F ðX ) Y Þ XM inConf . This is an asymmetric measure

as CONF(X) ⇒ Y) may be different from CONF(Y ⇒X).
4.3.3 Lift or Interest factor. It is the ratio of rule confidence to expected confidence. This
factor is a symmetric measure and used to measure the overall rule strength. It can also be
defined as the ratio of the joint probability of X and Y to expected joint probability if they
are statistically independent:

SU PðX[Y Þ jX [Y jUjDj
Lift or Interest factor ðX ) Y Þ ¼ ¼ :
SU P ðX ÞUSU PðY Þ jX jUjY j

The lift value measures how far X and Y are independent of each other and this value
ranges from 0 to +∞. Lift value 1 means that X and Y are independent and the rule is not
interesting. The evidence of Y gives information about X when the lift value is more than 1.
4.3.4. χ2 measure. It is a measure of statistical independence between the condition and
decision attributes. This is a symmetric measure and used to validate the hypothesis
(Buddhakulsomsiri et al., 2006):

jDjUðN 11 N 22 N 12 N 21 Þ2
w2 ðX ) Y Þ ¼ ;
N 1 N 2 N€ 1 N€ 2

where:

N 11 ¼ jX [Y j; N 22 ¼ jDjjX jjY j þ jX [Y j

N 12 ¼ jX jjX [Y j; N 21 ¼ jY jjX [Y j;

N 1 ¼ jX j; N 2 ¼ jDjjX j;

N€ 1 ¼ jY j; N€ 2 ¼ jDjjY j;
where |D| is the number transaction present in the database. |X| is the number of
transactions of antecedent part of the rule in the database. |Y| is the number of transactions
of consequent part of the rule in the database.
 χ2 does not assess the strength of the correlation between antecedent and consequent. It Spare parts
only assists in deciding the independence of these items that suggests that the measure is information in
not feasible for ranking purposes (Brin et al., 1997). For each rule, statistical evaluation is maintenance
performed using χ2 measure statistics. In this case, the degree of freedom is 2−1 ¼ 1 for a 2
× 2 table test. Following the hypothesis can be set for testing the significance of the rule:
schedule
H 0 ¼ Ruleissignificant:
1063
H 1 ¼ Ruleisnotsignificant:

We have reported that the rule is significant when Pðw2 4 w21;a Þ oa, where αis the
significance level of the test. In other way, when w2 4w21;a , the null hypothesis is accepted.

4.4 Rule-based classification of maintenance activities

After the selection of valid sequential rules using the training data set, these rules can be
used to classify the testing data. The consequent part of a new record is to be predicted
using this method. Referring to Han and Kamber (2006), the accuracy of prediction can be
measured by two important measures that are given below.
Let X be the tuple from a labeled database D and ηcovers be the number of tuples covered
by rule R. Then, the coverage measure can be determined by:
Zcovers
Coverage ¼ :
jD j
Another measure called rule accuracy can be determined as follows:
Zcorrect
Accuracy ¼ ;
Zcovers
where ηcorrect is the number of tuples classified by rule R. Rule coverage is the percentage of
tuples covered by the rule including both antecedent and consequent attributes. For
determining rule accuracy, we need to determine the tuples that the rule covers and see what
percentage of them the rule can correctly classify.

4.5 Frequent spares group generation

In this step, we need to determine the frequently used spare parts for individual
maintenance activities. Few spare parts are used in some of the maintenance transactions
and in some cases, more number of spare parts are used for the same maintenance activity.
So analyzing the historical consumption of spare parts demand, one can find the best group
that is frequently used in the same type of maintenance activity. For this purpose, the
traditional frequent itemset mining technique is used to determine frequent itemsets with a
given threshold support value. Let I ¼ {I1, I2, I3, …, Ip}be the set of all items, D ¼ {t1, t2,
t3, …, tn} set of all transactions and itemset X is a transaction in a database that is X ⊆ I.
Now the support of X can be calculated using the following expression:
jX j
SU P ðX Þ ¼ :
jD j
The itemset X is called a frequent itemset in a transaction database D if the calculated
support value is greater than or equal to the threshold or minimum support value (SUP(X))
⩾ MinSup) that is normally set by maintenance managers. In our model, we used this
JMTM approach to find the best group of spare parts with given support values and maximum
30,7 spare parts coverage. For example, with the threshold support value of 40 percent, we have
the following itemsets selected.
In Table V, we observe that {S1, S2, S4} and {S1, S3, S4} have highest spare parts
coverage of 3 with support 42.13 percent and 41.71 percent, respectively. Hence, the selected
best spare parts group is Max {Support {S1, S2, S4}, Support {S1, S3, S4}}, i.e. {S1, S2, S4}.
1064
4.6 Integrating sequential maintenance activities with associated spare parts
Once the sequences and respective spare parts groups are determined, it is needed to map
the maintenance activity to their spare parts group as shown in Figure 2. The support value
of sequential pattern (α) and support value of spare parts group (β) is independent of each
other. The α and β are a threshold or minimum values of support, which should be
suggested by maintenance managers. By setting a lower α value, one can generate a large
number of sequences and vice versa. In the same manner, the spare parts group size will be
more when β, the value, is less.

5. Illustration of the model: an industrial case study

In this study, data were collected from a reputed public sector opencast mining company
situated in the southern part of India. The company has implemented an integrated materials
management system since 2004 by integrating indenting, supplier sourcing, purchasing and
stores (inventory) modules. Hence, all the spare parts consumption information is stored in a
central database. The company has three major mining units that use different types of
special mining equipment such as bucket wheel excavators (28 no’s), belt conveyors (12 no’s),
Spreaders (16 no’s), Tripper cars (9 no’s), etc. The company manages nearly about 150,000 of
items and among those items, 105,217 are spare parts that are mostly consumed on mining
and power generation equipment. In our study, we have considered only the equipment belt
conveyor and the proposed model is applied to seven different maintenance activities of the
belt conveyor that consumes around 2,643 spare parts in different mining locations. In our
study, we collected the spare parts consumption history with respect to maintenance activities
for conveyor 1800 in Mine-I. Table VI shows seven maintenance activities and a few related
spare parts used during the maintenance activity. We collected the maintenance data and
spare parts consumption data from April 2006 to February 2012. We used binary transaction
data for spare parts consumption like the number “1” indicates that the spare part is
consumed and “0” indicates that the spare part is not consumed during the maintenance.

5.1 Results and discussion

In this study, seven maintenance activities of mobile transport conveyor like power section
maintenance, loose fixings, noise reduction, idler maintenance, conveyor frame

Spare part groups Support (%)

S1 87.24
S2 56.28
S3 55.42
S1, S2 50.42
S1, S3 49.28
S4 45.23
Table V. S1, S2, S4 42.13
Spare parts group S1, S3, S4 41.71
with support S2, S4 40.57
Maintenance Spare part code Part description
Spare parts
information in
Power section maintenance (M01) 490040037 (S11) Fanox electronic motor protection relay maintenance
490080064 (S12) Electrical spares for automatic buffing
499120322 (S13) 4 pole, 440 volts, 50 cycles, 40 AMPS
schedule
490040016 (S14) Electronic limit switch GW 2-000G – ITEM
490000879 (S15) Gasket 167.5X178X0.7 PTNO 400 V
490030120 (S16) Double solenoid value for 220 V AC motor 1065
Loose fixing and noise (M02) 497030005 (S21) Heater plate bolts and nuts, size: 6MM D
497030054 (S22) Special bolt and nut for BTR clamps as P
499120217 (S23) BTR clamp 2 1/2 inch with necessary bolt
499140003 (S24) Link bolt with self-locking nut for TI/RI for 1,800 mm
499140107 (S25) Link bolt with self-locking nut and wash
499140110 (S26) Link bolts of size 15.9 mm dia × 66.5 mm
499150142 (S27) 8.8 Grade bolt and nut of size 24×60 mm
499180010 (S28) Fish plate bolts type-II with nuts size
499180011 (S29) Nose piece bolt and nut as per
Idler maintenance (M03) 499130207 (S31) Side troughing idler size 159 mm dia × 1,100 mm long
499130409 (S32) Centre troughing idler size 159 mm dia × 1,100 mm long
499130211 (S33) Return troughing idler of 159 mm dia × 1,100 mm long
499140003 (S34) LInk bolt with self-locking nut for all idlers
499140108 (S35) Link plate for troughing and return idler
499140121 (S36) Shaft for the centre roller of troughing
499140167 (S37) Shaft dia 60/62 × 450 mm long for impact idler
499140241 (S38) Barrels for 2,000 mm conveyor return idler
Frame maintenance (M04) 492010408 (S41) L rod with pin for 2,400 mm conveyor standard frame
499140103 (S42) Standard shiftable frames in completely
499140118 (S43) Stress frames for 1,800 mm conveyor system
499170002 (S44) Shiftable a frame plate set
499170022 (S45) Cable clamp for 1,800 mm conveyor frames
499170036 (S46) Main frame for four roller track shifter
Belt maintenance (M05) 499120215 (S51) Metal cover sheet for 1,800 SC belt
499120001 (S52) Steel cord conveyor belt 1,800 mm ST 2250
499120221 (S53) E.R.W. pipe shed for 1,800 mm belts as PE
499120106 (S54) Belt cramp for 1,800 mm ST 4,000 S.C belt
499120102 (S55) Belt fastners plate type (3 inch)
497020001 (S56) Belt pulling clamps 50 mm
490070006 (S57) Belt dressing M/C cutter blades of steel
497010020 (S58) Cotton sheet for belt joints width 1,000
490030132 (S59) Belt pressing and lifting ARM 5/16 inch ID, DWB hose
Hydraulic system maintenance 490000092 (S61) Hydraulic cylinders – aluminium alloy FO
(M06)
490001251 (S62) Hydraulic clamp tower jacks cylinder (IT)
490010217 (S63) Hydraulic jack oil seal: 315 × 355 × 33.3 for Wagner press
490030045 (S64) Hydraulic oil pressure gauge (1) range
493020013 (S65) Pressure foot for Nilos hydraulic jack O
499050201 (S66) Hydraulic hose confirms to SAE 100 R2 ID
499050297 (S67) Hydraulic hose of ID5/16 inches and length 3,000 mm
499120101 (S68) End bolt for hydraulic Traversefor 1,800
499120304 (S69) Nilos hydraulic cylinders with “T” joint
Bearing and lubrication (M07) 490000122 (S71) Bearing housings for troughing and retur
491020009 (S72) Bearing cover inner & outer and labyrint
499130007 (S73) Grease seal ring for impact idlers of 1,800 mm conveyor
499130215 (S74) Barrel with bearing housings welded on B Table VI.
499130401 (S75) Bearing housing for impact idler of 1,800 Spare parts data
499130416 (S76) Grease seal ring for troughing idler & R taken for analysis
JMTM maintenance, belt maintenance, hydraulic system maintenance, and bearing and lubrication
30,7 have been considered. Maintenance activities related to spare parts code and descriptions
are presented in Table VI. This study has used GSP algorithms for generating the
58 sequential patterns with a threshold value of support 30 percent (see Table VII) and
similarly, 27 patterns were also generated with 40 percent support value (see Table VIII).
For computational simplicity, we have used 40 percent support values to demonstrate the
1066 rule-based classification approach. The sequences having single maintenance activity are
ignored from the model as they do not convey any information about the next
maintenance activity. In this analysis, it is assumed that there is no occurrence of parallel
maintenance activities in the conveyor belt. In this study, “→” indicates the sequence
directions and “⇒” indicates the rule directions.
From Table VIII, it can be identified that M04 →M03 is the best pattern among the two
maintenance combinations due to higher support value. Similarly, in Table IX, for three
maintenance activities combinations, M06 →M03 → M02 is selected as the best sequence. It
can also be observed from Table IX that sequence M05 →M06 → M03 has higher support
value than M06 →M03 → M02 but still the later one is selected as the best due to lesser
inter-arrival time or average interval time. In the same manner, the sequence M05 →M06 →
M03 → M02 is selected as the best sequence with the support of 48.20 percent considering
four maintenance combinations. One can observe that there is no further five maintenance

Sl. No. Sequences Intervals (weeks) Support (%)

1 M01 – 99.22
2 M03 – 96.39
3 M05 – 83.61
4 M02 – 80.33
5 M04 – 74.76
6 M06 – 74.49
7 M04 →M03 0–1 70.20
8 M03 →M02 0–1 67.69
9 M01 →M03 0–2 59.15
10 M01 →M03 0–1 57.87
11 M05 →M03 0–3 57.51
12 M06 →M03 0–1 57.33
13 M06 →M03 0–3 51.67
14 M05 →M06 0–2 49.66
15 M05 →M06 → M03 0–2–3 49.29
16 M05 →M02 0–4 48.61
17 M05 →M03 → M02 0–3–4 48.52
18 M06 →M02 0–2 48.47
19 M06 →M03 → M02 0–1–2 48.38
20 M05 →M06 → M02 0–2–4 48.29
21 M05 →M06 → M03 → M02 0–2–3–4 48.20
22 M01 →M02 0–2 44.04
23 M01 →M03 →M02 0–1–2 43.86
24 M04 →M02 0–2 42.54
25 M04 →M03 →M02 0–1–2 42.36
26 M01 →M04 0–1 40.07
… … … …
… … … …
55 M06 →M01 → M04 → M03 0–1–2–3 31.99
Table VII. 56 M05, M06 →M01 → M03 0–1–3 31.99
Generated sequential 57 M01 →M04, M06 → M03 0–1–3 31.95
patterns 58 M05, M06 →M01 →M04 → M03 0–1–2–3 31.81
Sequences Intervals (weeks) Average interval Support (%)
Spare parts
information in
M04 →M03 0–1 1 70.20* maintenance
M03 →M02 0–1 1 67.69
M01 →M03 0–2 2 59.15 schedule
M01 →M03 0–1 1 57.87
M05 →M03 0–3 3 57.51
M06 →M03 0–1 1 57.33 1067
M06 →M03 0–3 3 51.67
M05 →M06 0–2 2 49.66
M05 →M02 0–4 4 48.61
M06 →M02 0–2 2 48.47
M01 →M02 0–2 2 44.04 Table VIII.
M04 →M02 0–2 2 42.54 Two-maintenance
M01 →M04 0–1 1 40.07 combinations

Maintenance activities Interval Average interval Support (%)

M05 →M06 → M03 0–2–3 1.5 49.29

M05 →M03 → M02 0–3–4 2 48.52
M06 →M03 → M02 0–1–2 1 48.38*
M05 →M06 → M02 0–2–4 2 48.29 Table IX.
M01 →M03 →M02 0–1–2 1 43.86 Three-maintenance
M04 →M03 →M02 0–1–2 1 42.36 combinations

combination exists with threshold support of 40 percent. Moreover, another important

factor for selecting the best sequence is the number of maintenance activities present in the
sequence. From Table X, it can be observed that sequence M05 →M06 → M03 → M02 has
four maintenance activities (highest coverage) that occur 48.20 percent time or 1,056 times
out of 2,191 total transactions.
Using the sequence (M05 →M06 → M03 → M02), the rule M05 →M06 → M03 ⇒ M02
can be generated, which means when the sequence M05 → M06 → M03 has occurred, and
then M02 is probable to occur after within one week of time. Now, one can compute the four
different rule measures by using the procedure discussed in Section 3.
Rule support:

jX [Y j 1;056
SU P ðX ) Y Þ ¼ ¼  100 ¼ 48:20%:
jD j 2;191
Rule confidence:

jX [Y j 1;056
CON F ðX ) Y Þ ¼ ¼  100 ¼ 97:78%:
jX j 1;080

Maintenance activities Interval Average interval Support (%) Table X.

Four-maintenance
M05 →M06 → M03 → M02 0–2–3–4 1.34 48.20* combinations
JMTM Lift:
30,7 SU P ðX [Y Þ jX [Y jUjDj
Lift or Interest factor ðX ) Y Þ ¼ ¼
SU P ðX ÞUSU P ðY Þ jX jUjY j
1;056U2191
¼ ¼ 1:21;
1;080U1760
1068
χ2 measure:

2; 191Uð1; 056  40724  704Þ2

w2 ðX ) Y Þ ¼ ¼ 410:39:
1; 080  1; 111  1; 760  431
In this case, the degree of freedom is one and considering α as 0.005, w21;a the value is found
as 7.879 using the χ2 table. Hence, the null hypothesis is rejected as w2 4 w21;a and the rule
M05 →M06 → M03 ⇒ M02 is significant (see Table XI). Three possible rules can be found
from this sequence as it is unidirectional in nature. For example, the rule M05 →M06 →
M02 ⇒ M03 is not a feasible rule as the sequence direction M02 ⇒ M03 is not correct.
Table XII shows the four measures of these rules. We have observed that the three rules are
significantly based on χ2 test and lift values. But when the confidence is restricted to
90 percent, only two rules M05 →M06 → M03 ⇒ M02 and M05 →M06 ⇒ M03 → M02 are
able to satisfy all the four measures.
After the generation of the sequential rules for classification, we have tested these rules with
a test data of 225 maintenance transactions for validation. The results of rule coverage and
accuracy are shown in Table XII. It is observed that rules are predicted accurately with test data.
The next step of the model is to find out the frequent spare parts group for each maintenance
activities separately. In Table XIII, we have shown 350 records of spare parts consumption for
belt maintenance (M03). The spare parts group is determined by using the procedure mentioned
in Section 3 and the result is given in Table XIV considering support of 50 percent.
One can observe that spare parts {S33, S34, S38, S39} are selected as the best group for
M03. Similarly, {S52, S54, S55, S57, S59}, {S61, S63, S64, S68} and {S23, S25, S26, S27, S29} are
selected for M05, M06 and M02, respectively, as shown in Figure 3. Now, these groups are
mapped into individual maintenance activities and intervals. From Figure 4, it can be observed
that more number of spare parts are covered by a 40 percent support level instead of 50 percent.

6. Conclusion and further research

In this paper, we have made an attempt to suggest the list of sequential maintenance
activities based on historical records of maintenance data. Our sequential mining approach

Table XI. Sl. No. Rules Supp (%) Conf (%) Lift χ2 Validity
All possible rules
generated from 1 M05 → M06 → M03 ⇒ M02 48.20 97.78 1.21 410.39 Significant
M05 →M06 → 2 M05 → M06 ⇒ M03 → M02 48.20 97.06 1.43 852.51 Significant
M03 → M02 3 M05 ⇒ M06 → M03 → M02 48.20 57.64 1.19 391.71 Significant

Sl. No. Rules ηcovers ηcorrect Coverage (%) Accuracy (%)

Table XII. 1 M05 → M06 → M03 ⇒ M02 92 88 40.10 95.65

Prediction results with 2 M05 → M06 ⇒ M03 → M02 92 82 40.10 89.13
test data (D ¼ 225) 3 M05 ⇒ M06 → M03 → M02 92 68 40.10 73.91
 Spare parts consumption
Spare parts
Maintenance ID Type of maintenance S31 S32 S33 S34 S35 S36 S37 S38 S39 information in
maintenance
1 M03 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 1
2 M03 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 schedule
3 M03 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0
4 M03 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
5 M03 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1069
6 M03 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Table XIII.
… … … … … … … … … … … Spare parts
… … … … … … … … … … … consumption
350 M03 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 history for M03

Maintenance activity Spare part groups Support (%)

Idler maintenance (M03) S33, S37, S39 57.14

S31, S33, S34 56.28
S33, S34, S38, S39 55.42*
S33, S34, S35, S39 53.42
S31, S33, S34, S39 52.28 Table XIV.
S35, S36, S37, S38 52.00 Selecting spare part
S31, S33, S34, S37 49.71 groups with support
S31, S33, S34, S36, S39 46.57 50 percent

0–2 0–1 0–1

M05 M06 M03 M02 40%

Figure 3.
Maintenance
S52 S23 sequence and selected
S61 S33
S54 S25 spare parts
S63 S34
S55 S26 50% consumption with
S64 S38 support 40 percent
S57 S27
S68 S39 and 50 percent
S59 S29

0–2 0–1 0–1

M05 M06 M03 M02 40%

S51 S23
S33 Figure 4.
S52 S61 S24
S34 Maintenance sequence
S54 S63 S25
S35 40% and selected spare
S55 S64 S26
S38 parts consumption
S57 S68 S27 with common support
S39
S59 S29 ¼ 40 percent
JMTM gives a better way of analyzing the sequences as compared to the traditional approach of
30,7 statistical analysis, particularly when the volume of maintenance data is large. Data mining
uses complex SQL (Structured Query Language) queries that are executed in databases.
This SQL execution takes very less time to extract useful information from a large volume of
data as compared to traditional statistical methods. Usually, in many companies,
maintenance managers suggest the maintenance activities on thumb rule basis or on the
1070 basis of their experience and physical monitoring of the equipment at regular intervals. The
suggested approach tries to eliminate these manual efforts. One can generate a longer
sequence that covers more number of maintenance activities based on the threshold value.
Moreover, the present work tried to map the frequent group of spare parts in each of the
maintenance activity of the generated sequence based on threshold support values set by
decision makers. If the managers want to cover more number of spares, they can simply
decrease the threshold values. This will help maintenance managers to carry the spare parts
directly to maintenance location that will decrease the number of trips from stores to
maintenance location and thereby reduce the transportation cost. The proposed method is
dynamic in nature for suggesting maintenance activities as it is directly connected to the
maintenance database. The generated sequential patterns may change periodically
depending upon the actual changes or personalization in maintenance activities.
Our proposed model analyses the past corrective maintenance records of equipment and
tries to discover sequential activities of different maintenance activities including time
stamp information. This model can be extended for analyzing the failure maintenance
activities and to perform root cause analysis that can give more valuable suggestion to
maintenance managers to take corrective actions prior to the next occurrence of failures.
Add to that, the timestamp information can also be utilized to prioritize the maintenance
activity that is ignored in this study. In a future study, one can try to incorporate the time
interval weight for extracting the sequences. Also, the proposed method in this paper can be
compared with other maintenance policies in a future study.

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improvement in manufacturing industry”, Expert Systems with Applications, Vol. 38 No. 10,
pp. 13448-13467.
Moharana, U.C. and Sarmah, S.P. (2018), “Joint replenishment of associated spare parts using clustering
approach”, International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Vol. 94 Nos 5–8,
pp. 2535-2549.
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acceleration of support counting for stream mining of sequences and frequent itemsets”, ACM
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towards the use of data mining technique: a review”, in Shah, N.H. and Mittal, M. (Eds),
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Zhang, R. and Yang, J. (2006), “Association rules based research on man-made mistakes in aviation
maintenance: a case study”, Proceeding of the Sixth International Conference on Intelligent
Systems Design and Applications, pp. 545-550.

Corresponding author
S.P. Sarmah can be contacted at: spsarmah@iem.iitkgp.ernet.in

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