Opportunistic Maintenance Policy for a Multi-Component System Subject to Random Failures

Abstract

In this paper, an opportunistic maintenance policy (OMP) for a multi-component system is studied. The objective is to minimize the maintenance cost while guaranteeing a minimum level of reliability for the system and for each of its components. Each component is subject to random failures and at most one spare part of it should be kept in stock or ordering at any time. The lifetime of this system will be divided into several periods. At the beginning of each period, the set of actions (among many others) must be determined in order to achieve the objective mentioned above. The policy OMP is characterized by two parameters; the first one is the scheduled time for spare ordering and the second one is the period of realization of the maintenance action (if any). These parameters will be derived from the joint optimization of maintenance cost and the inventory cost for each component. Finally, a numerical example to explain the proposed maintenance policy and the optimization procedure is provided.