The operation and management of a plant require proper accounting for the constraints coming from reliability requirements as well as from budget and resource considerations. Most of the mathematical methods to decide the inspection time interval for plant maintenance by reliability theory are too complicated to be solved. Moreover, the mathematical and theoretical models are not usually cases in the practical applications. In order to overcome these problems, we propose a new the decision-making method of optimal inspection interval to minimize the maintenance cost by reliability theory and genetic algorithm (GA). The most merit of the proposed method is to decide the inspection interval for a plant machine of which failure rate $lambda$(t) conforms to any probability distribution. Therefore, this method is more practical. The efficiency of the proposed method is verified by comparing the results obtained by GA-based method with the inspection model haying regular time interval.