On preventive maintenance of networks with components subject to external shocks

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a network consisting of n components in which the components are subject to shocks arriving based on a counting process. At the occurrence time of each shock, some of components may fail and hence the network fails due to one of these shocks. We propose some preventive maintenance (PM) models based on the notion of t-signature. The proposed PM models are aged-based models relying on the cost and availability criteria. We also extend a time-free PM model which is known as shock-based PM model and explore the number of shocks that minimizes the mean cost per one shock. The advantage of this time-free PM model is that it does not depend on the process of occurrence of the shocks. Some examples are also provided to illustrate the applications of the proposed PM models.