A hybrid condition-based maintenance policy for continuously monitored components with two degradation thresholds

Abstract

Condition-based maintenance (CBM) makes use of the actual condition of the component to decide when to maintain and/or replace the component, thereby maximising the lifetime of the machine, while minimising the number of service interventions. In this paper we combine CBM on one (monitored) component, with periodic preventive maintenance (PM) and corrective maintenance (CM) on the other components of the same machine/system. We implement two thresholds on the degradation level to decide when to service the monitored component: when the degradation level of the monitored component surpasses a first ‘opportunistic’ threshold, the monitored component will be serviced together with other components, for instance with a (planned) PM intervention, or upon breakdown of another component, requiring CM. In case none of these opportunities have taken place, and the degradation level surpasses a second ‘intervention’ threshold, an additional maintenance intervention is planned for the monitored component in order to prevent a failure. Both thresholds are optimised to minimise the total expected maintenance costs of the monitored component, or to minimise the downtime of the machine due to maintenance on the monitored component. We perform an extensive numerical experiment to demonstrate the potential gains of this hybrid policy with two thresholds compared to using a traditional PM policy, and we identify its key drivers of performance. We also benchmark our results when only one threshold is implemented. Our model is validated and applied at an OEM in the compressed air and generator industry.