A Comparative Study of Preventive Maintenance Thresholds for Deteriorating Systems

Abstract

Degradation of engineering systems is a phenomenon that affects the reliability and the lifetime of systems. Maintenance of deteriorating systems has been widely studied over the past 50 years. Numerous maintenance models have been proposed in the literature to manage degradation. In this paper, we focus on a condition-based maintenance strategy for those systems suffering a continuous deterioration process. We propose the use of a non-constant maintenance threshold to determine when a preventive action is required. The main goal is to analyse the effect of non-constant threshold in the long-term maintenance cost rate. We demonstrate numerically the convergence of the long run cost rate and some statistical properties of the proposed model. We compare the use of a constant threshold with a non-constant threshold through two different simulated case studies. The simulations provide some statistical results that reveals interesting advantages and drawbacks of using a non-constant threshold.