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The purpose of this paper is to optimize the preventive maintenance based on fault tree (FT)–Bayesian network (BN) reliability for sugarcane harvester machine as a fundamental machine in the sugar industry that must be operated failure-free during a given period of the harvesting process.

To determine machine reliability using the algorithm developed based on mapping FTs into BNs, the common failures of 168 machines were carefully investigated over 12 years (2007–2019). This algorithm was then used to predict the harvester reliability, estimate delays by machine downtimes and their consequences on white sugar production losses that can be reduced by optimizing the preventive maintenance scheduling.

The optimization of preventive maintenance scheduling based on estimated reliability of sugarcane harvester machines using FT–BNs can reduce white sugar production losses, the operation-stopping breakdowns and the downtime costs as a crisis that the sugar industry is facing.

Machine reliability gradually decreased by 31.08% approximately, which resulted in a working time loss of 26% in the 2018–19 harvesting season. In total, the white sugar losses were estimated as 204.17 tons for burnt canes and 114.53 tons for green canes. The losses of the 2018–19 harvesting season have been 11.85 times greater than the first harvesting season. The proposed maintenance interval for critical subsystems including the hydraulic, chopper and base cutter were obtained as 1.815, 1.12 and 1.05 h, respectively.

In this study, a new approach was used to optimize preventive maintenance to reduce delays and their implications upon costs in time, inconvenience and white sugar losses. The FT–BNs algorithm was found a useful tool that was over-fitting of failure occurrence probabilities data for sugarcane harvester machine.