Reliability Assessment of Degradable Systems under Imperfect Maintenance and Utilisation Rate: A Case Study

Abstract

Medical equipment is the biggest capital investment of every healthcare industry and ensuring the reliability and maintenance for critical devices is vital for Patient/user safety and better availability of services. To keep the medical device in a good operational condition, Inspection based maintenance activities have been the most usual means. The purpose of this study is to establish an improved delay time framework to model the two-stage failure process taking into account the influence of the utilization rate on the system’s degradation on the assumption of imperfect maintenance at inspection. This proportional delay time model is seldom considered in DTMs widely used in literature. A complete framework, for Parameters estimation method and the test for goodness of fit is given. To illustrate the model capabilities, a reel case study from the healthcare domain is presented, the model parameters are estimated entirely using the collected maintenance data. Then, the maximum likelihood estimation of the reliability parameters is achieved by Genetic Algorithms.