**5. Conclusion**

In this chapter, the importance of optimally planning maintenance activities for mining organization was discussed. A solution framework for optimizing the preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance and production schedule was proposed using ant colony optimization. Many mining organization can benefit by

*An Innovative Maintenance Scheduling Framework for Preventive, Predictive Maintenance… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.103094*

using this solution framework to reduce the overall maintenance costs and production losses.

As mining companies adopt and implement Industry 4.0, this maintenance solution framework has the potential to evolve beyond maintenance schedules to allocation of ore to customer demand, planning truck routing, and even to mine planning. ACO as part of the wider Swarm intelligence algorithms presents the capacity to achieve Industry 4.0 vision, where individual machines cooperate through self-organization, that is, without any form of central control to achieve the organization KPIs.
