Optimal Maintenance of Multi-component Systems: A Review

Abstract

In this article we give an overview of the literature on multi-component maintenance optimization. We focus on work appearing since the 1991 survey A survey of maintenance models for multi-unit systems by Cho and Parlar (1991). This paper builds forth on the review article by Dekker et al. (1996), which focusses on economic dependence, and the survey of maintenance policies by Wang (2002), in which some group maintenance and some opportunistic maintenance policies are considered. Our classification scheme is primarily based on the dependence between components (stochastic, structural or economic). Next, we also classify the papers on the basis of the planning aspect (short-term vs longterm), the grouping of maintenance activities (either grouping preventive or corrective maintenance, or opportunistic grouping) and the optimization approach used (heuristic, policy classes or exact algorithms). Finally, we also pay attention to the applications of the models.

Exploring maintenance policy selection using the Analytic Hierarchy Process; An application for naval ships

“…Furthermore, current, mostly quantitative, maintenance optimization and decision models have low applicability in practice, creating a gap between academia and practice: the scarcity of practical approaches to maintenance modelling was already pointed out in 1992 [9], and not much has changed since. Although maintenance is something that should be done in practice, several authors argue that practical studies are still under-represented [10,11] In the 1990s, a novel approach to maintenance decision making emerged. Arguing that decision theory has become a useful tool to many professionals including engineers, and many maintenance challenges can be modelled as multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problems, the use of MCDM methods has been suggested for maintenance decision making [12,13].…”

Maintenance strategy decision for avionics system based on cognitive uncertainty information processing

“…Reliability is proportional to amount of maintenance received and knowledge of men who performed such maintenance [13,17]. Now, an avionics system may comprise a large number of components, and efficient maintenance strategy is required to improve the reliability of relevant functions and to reduce high maintenance cost.…”

Inspection optimization model with imperfect maintenance based on a three-stage failure process

“…However, such determination is conservative and undesired although it is easy to implement. Many researchers have developed numerous PM models to find the optimal inspection interval under various modeling assumptions [1,8,9]. However, in contrast with other PM models [3,13], the models based on the delay-time concept have been proved to have the obvious advantages for optimizing the inspection interval since the delay-time technique can directly model the relationship between the inspection intervention and the system performance, see [15,17,22].…”