Selective Maintenance Optimization for a Multi-State System Considering Human Reliability

Abstract

In an actual industrial or military operations environment, a multi-state system (MSS) consisting of multi-state components often needs to perform multiple missions in succession. To improve the probability of the system successfully completing the next mission, all the maintenance activities need to be performed during maintenance breaks between any two consecutive missions under limited maintenance resources. In such case, selective maintenance is a widely used maintenance policy. As a typical discrete mathematics problem, selective maintenance has received widespread attention. In this work, a selective maintenance model considering human reliability for multi-component systems is investigated. Each maintenance worker can be in one of multiple discrete working levels due to their human error probability (HEP). The state of components after maintenance is assumed to be random and follow an identified probability distribution. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a human reliability model and a method to determine the state distribution of components after maintenance. The objective of selective maintenance scheduling is to find the maintenance action with the optimal reliability for each component in a maintenance break subject to constraints of time and cost. In place of an enumerative method, a genetic algorithm (GA) is employed to solve the complicated optimization problem taking human reliability into account. The results show the importance of considering human reliability in selective maintenance scheduling for an MSS.

Keywords

• selective maintenance
• multi-state system
• human reliability
• optimization
• genetic algorithm