Selective maintenance for multi-state systems considering the benefits of repairing multiple components simultaneously

Abstract

Many industrial systems such as aircrafts, ships, manufacturing systems, etc. are required to perform several missions with finite breaks between missions. Maintenance is only available within the breaks. Due to the limitation of resources, all components in the system may not be maintained as desired. The selective maintenance problem helps the decision makers figure out what critical components to select and how to perform maintenance on these components. This paper studies the selective maintenance for multi-state series-parallel systems with the benefit of repairing multiple components simultaneously. Both time and cost savings can be acquired when several components are simultaneously repaired in a selective maintenance strategy. As the number of repaired components increases, the saved time and cost will also increase due to the share of setting up between components and another additional reduction amount from the repair of multiple identical components. A non-linear optimization model is developed to find the most reliable system subjected to time and cost constraints. Genetic algorithm is used to solve the optimization model. An illustrative example will be provided.