Maintenance cycle optimisation of multi-component systems under the constraints of overall cost and reliability

Abstract

Periodic maintenance inevitably leads to 'over-maintenance' or 'non-timely maintenance' of equipment or systems. To improve reliability and reduce maintenance cost, this paper presents a dynamic maintenance cycle optimisation model for multi-component systems. In this paper, the influence of different maintenance intervals on system reliability and total maintenance cost is determined under the conditions that the system has a limited service time and the components are not fully maintained. The model uses the optimisation of system maintenance cost as the objective function to determine the optimal preventive maintenance times and maintenance intervals under the constraint of the lowest reliability of the system. The simulation results of the final example verify that the proposed method can significantly improve the maintenance cost, system reliability, and reliability fluctuation stability. And it can be used to guide subway maintenance cycle optimisation.