Availability Analysis and Preventive Maintenance Planning for Systems with General Time Distributions

Naichao Wang, Jiawen Hu, Lin Ma, Boping Xiao and Haitao Liao

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2020, vol. 201, issue C

Abstract: Steady-state availability is one of the most important performance measures for repairable systems. To improve the steady-state availability of such systems, preventive maintenance (PM) models have been extensively studied. However, these models assume that the distributions of the system lifetime and maintenance duration are exponential. In practice, the probabilistic characteristics of different systems and maintenance actions are so broad making the exponential distribution an inappropriate model. This paper seeks to determine the optimal PM strategy that maximizes the steady-state availability of a system involving general probability distributions. Specifically, PM is scheduled periodically, and a certain number of imperfect maintenance (IM) actions are carried out before each replacement. We develop state-transition equations involving general probability distributions using a supplementary variable method. The stationary distribution is calculated by solving the system of linear equations, through which the steady-state availability of the system is obtained. We prove the existence of the optimal combination of the number of IM actions before each replacement and the scheduled PM interval. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in handling such practical maintenance problems.

Keywords: Steady-state availability; general distributions; supplementary variable method; imperfect maintenance; state-transition equation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832020304944
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:201:y:2020:i:c:s0951832020304944

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2020.106993

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().