Maintenance Optimization for Repairable Deteriorating Systems under Imperfect Preventive Maintenance

Abstract

This study deals with the preventive maintenance optimization problem based on a reliability threshold. The conditional reliability threshold is used instead of the system reliability threshold. Then, the difference between the two thresholds is discussed. The hybrid failure rate model is employed to represent the effect of imperfect preventive maintenance activities. Two maintenance strategies are proposed under two types of reliability constraints. These constraints are set to consider the cost-effective maintenance strategy and to evaluate the balancing point between the expected total maintenance cost rate and the system reliability. The objective of the proposed maintenance strategies is to determine the optimal conditional reliability threshold together with the optimal number of preventive maintenance activities that minimize the expected total maintenance cost per unit time. The optimality conditions of the proposed maintenance strategies are also investigated and shown via four propositions. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the proposed preventive maintenance strategies. Some sensitivity analyses are also conducted to investigate how the parameters of the proposed model affect the optimality of preventive maintenance strategies.

Keywords

• preventive maintenance
• imperfect repair
• optimization
• reliability threshold
• repairable system