Maintenance problems are crucial aspect of nowadays industrial problems. However, the quest of the efficient periodicity of maintenance for all components of a system is far from an easy task to accomplish when considering all the antagonistic criteria of the maintenance and production views of a production system. Thus, the objective is to simultaneously ensure a low frequency of failures by an efficient periodic preventive maintenance and minimize the unavailability of the system due to preventive maintenance. This implies a minimum impact on the production. In this paper, several tools are combined to collaborate in order to optimize multi-component preventive maintenance problems. The structure of the maintenance-production system is modeled thanks to a framework inspired by our previous research projects. The dynamic aspects are modeled by a combination of timed petri-nets and PDEVS models and implemented in our VLE simulator. The parameters of the resulting simulation model are optimized via a Nelder-Mead (Simplex) Method. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.