Optimal sequential preventive maintenance policy for a repairable system with maintenance windows

Abstract

Optimization of sequential preventive maintenance has been widely studied. However, some issues need further discussion when considering certain real factors. Hence, an sequential preventive maintenance policy for a mono-unit repairable system with maintenance windows is proposed. The load strength and catastrophic failures of a system are considered in the reliability model, and an optimization of the SPM policy is rigorously proven by an analytical method. The existence and uniqueness of the optimal solution with a monotone increasing failure intensity function are presented in detail. The proof of theory indicates that the length of the maintenance window has an upper bound. Finally, a numerical example and some sensitivity analyses are given to illustrate the proposed sequential preventive maintenance policy. Results show that waste may occur when performing the general sequential preventive maintenance policy and may increase along with the length of the maintenance windows.