Maintenance has a relevant strategic role in a company, fundamental to the success of organizations, the performance of this sector involves reducing the time of machine downtime, contributing to the efficiency of the process and reduction of operating costs. Preventive intervention is an important type of maintenance, its purpose is to reduce failures based on planning with defined time intervals, however, determining the best period is not a trivial activity. The purpose of this work is to use mathematical programming concepts to formulate a model that helps define a preventive maintenance schedule, aiming to find the best time interval for machine intervention based on cost information, service time and hand capacity. of work. The mathematical model was applied to the railway environment in order to certify the feasibility of using Operational Research methods, the results obtained proved to be a good tool for application. Compared to the current model, the preventive maintenance schedule developed in this work provided savings of 40 percent for the company, in addition to an average increase of 30 percent in availability each quarter of Socadora model machines.