Selective maintenance optimization for random phased-mission systems subject to random common cause failures

Abstract

In both industrial and military fields, there is such a kind of complicated system termed as phased-mission system, which executes missions composed of several different phases in sequence. The structure, failure behavior, and working conditions of such a system may change from phase to phase. The duration of each phase of such a system involved is random and follows a probability distribution, and the system may suffer some events resulting in simultaneous failures of different elements with different probabilities. In order to guarantee such a system completes the phased-mission successfully, a selective maintenance model for random phased-mission systems subject to random common cause failures is proposed to optimally identify a subset of maintenance activities to be performed on some elements of the system. Thereinto, a novel analytic model is developed to estimate the probability of the maintained random phased-mission system successfully completing the phased-mission, and we compare it with a well-known Monte Carlo Simulation approach. Finally, the proposed selective maintenance model has been successfully applied to an artillery weapon system. Comparative analysis is carried out to compare the proposed model with the traditional ones, including selective maintenance models for deterministic phased-mission systems and deterministic single-phase mission systems. The results show that ignoring some mission properties (e.g. randomness and multiple phases) in selective maintenance optimization will lead to (1) incorrect system and mission modeling, (2) incorrect computation of the probability of the random phased-mission system successfully completing a mission, and/or (3) nonoptimal selective maintenance options.