Integrating Modelling of Maintenance Policies within a Stochastic Hybrid Automaton Framework of Dynamic Reliability

Abstract

The dependability assessment is a crucial activity for determining the availability, safety and maintainability of a system and establishing the best mitigation measures to prevent serious flaws and process interruptions. One of the most promising methodologies for the analysis of complex systems is Dynamic Reliability (also known as DPRA) with models that define explicitly the interactions between components and variables. Among the mathematical techniques of DPRA, Stochastic Hybrid Automaton (SHA) has been used to model systems characterized by continuous and discrete variables. Recently, a DPRA-oriented SHA modelling formalism, known as Stochastic Hybrid Fault Tree Automaton (SHyFTA), has been formalized together with a software library (SHyFTOO) that simplifies the resolution of complex models. At the state of the art, SHyFTOO allows analyzing the dependability of multistate repairable systems characterized by a reactive maintenance policy. Exploiting the flexibility of SHyFTA, this paper aims to extend the tools’ functionalities to other well-known maintenance policies. To achieve this goal, the main features of the preventive, risk-based and condition-based maintenance policies will be analyzed and used to design a software model to integrate into the SHyFTOO. Finally, a case study to test and compare the results of the different maintenance policies will be illustrated.