Junbao Geng 1, Michael Azarian 2, Michael Pecht 2
1College of Power Engineering, Naval University of Engineering, Wuhan 430033, China
2CALCE, Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20740, USA
Abstract:
Although opportunistic maintenance strategies are
widely used for multi-component systems, all opportunistic maintenance
strategies only consider economic dependence and do not
take structural dependence into account. An opportunistic maintenance
strategy is presented for a multi-component system that
considers both structural dependence and economic dependence.
The cost relation and time relation among components based on
structural dependence are developed. The maintenance strategy
for each component of a multi-component system involves one
of five maintenance actions, namely, no-maintenance, a minimal
maintenance action, an imperfect maintenance action, a perfect
maintenance action, and a replacement action. The maintenance
action is determined by the virtual age of the component, the
life expectancy of the component, and the age threshold values.
Monte Carlo simulation is designed to obtain the optimal opportunistic
maintenance strategy of the system over its lifetime. The
simulation result reveals that the minimum maintenance cost with
a strategy that considers structural dependence is less than that
with a strategy that does not consider structural dependence. The
availability with a strategy that considers structural dependence is
greater than that with a strategy that does not consider structural
dependence under the same conditions.