A dynamic opportunistic preventive maintenance policy for multi-unit series systems with intermediate buffers

Xiaojun Zhou, Zhiqiang Lu and Lifeng Xi

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2010, vol. 6, issue 3, 276-288

Abstract: Commonly, for a multi-unit series system, whenever one of the units stops to perform a preventive maintenance action, preventive maintenance opportunities arise for the other units because combining the preventive maintenance activities can save the system-dependent cost (i.e. downtime cost). This article proposes an opportunistic preventive maintenance policy for multi-unit series systems based on dynamic programming, with integrating the online information of the intermediate buffers. Whenever one of the units reaches its reliability threshold, a preventive maintenance action has to be performed on that unit. An optimal preventive maintenance practice is determined by maximising the short-term cumulative opportunistic maintenance cost savings for the whole system which is a combination of the maintenance cost saving, the downtime cost saving, the penalty cost for advancing the preventive maintenance action and the penalty cost for work in process. Finally, a numerical example is given throughout to show how this approach works.

Keywords: preventive maintenance; opportunistic maintenance; dynamic programming; multi-unit series systems; intermediate buffers; system-dependent costs; downtime costs; online information; reliability thresholds; short-term cost savings; penalty costs; work in process; optimisation; maintenance policy. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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