A realistic maintenance model based on a new state diagram

Abstract

Equipments that deteriorate over its useful life are subjected to regular inspection and maintenance to prevent failures. These scheduled maintenance activities are frequently modeled using a state diagram due to its simplicity. However, maintenance models based on classical state diagrams provide invalid results when inspection rates are non periodic. This paper discusses the mismatches of the model properties of classical state diagrams with the maintenance situation in the real world. We propose a new state diagram which represents the maintenance situation in the real world. The classical state diagram and the proposed state diagram are analyzed using Markov methods in a numerical example to compute performance measures. These results are compared with the results obtained by conducting Monte Carlo simulation according to practical and realistic inspection and maintenance procedures. It is shown that the classical state diagram can be replaced with the proposed state diagram to obtain an accurate maintenance model, which represents the real situation and provides valid results. © 2010 IEEE.