A study on group maintenance policies

Abstract

ABSTRACT An efficient preventive group maintenance policy is proposed in this thesis. The motivation for developing this policy came from a need to consider the system/component reliability as an important factor in providing an optimal maintenance policy. The conventional group maintenance policies are cost-based models and the maintenance actions to be carried out at the time of maintenance are decided with a basis on maintenance cost. In the first part of this thesis, Reliability-centered T-based and m-based preventive group maintenance policies are proposed for a parallel or parallel-series or k-out-of-n system whose components are iid. In the second part, a system with non-iid components is considered and a mathematical model which can project an optimal maintenance policy based on the maintenance degree is provided. Pre-determined reliability level is used as a primary decision criterion in these models. A probabilistic approach is used for the model formulations and a numerical comparison is made between the proposed models for each system.