Determining the inspection intervals for one-shot systems with support equipment

Abstract

This paper considers systems that comprise one-shot devices and support equipment. One-shot devices are stored for long periods of time, and failures are detected only upon inspection. The support equipment needed to operate one-shot devices is maintained immediately upon failure. This paper addresses the inspection schedule problem for such systems with limited maintenance resources. The interval availability and life cycle cost are used as optimization criteria. The aim is to determine near-optimal inspection intervals for one-shot systems to minimize the expected life cycle cost and satisfy the target interval availability between inspection periods. An estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) and a heuristic method are proposed to find the near-optimal solutions, and numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effects of the various model parameters to the near-optimal inspection intervals.