Optimal Maintenance of a System With Multiple Deteriorating Components Served by Dedicated Teams

Abstract

To maintain a multi-component system, different dedicated service teams with different skill sets and tools are often involved. Such a relationship constitutes maintenance team coalition. In most cases, it may not be the best to plan each team's maintenance activities independently as such independent decisions may not achieve the required system-level reliability performance (RP). To balance the reliability and costs of components in achieving a high level of system RP, an efficient method is to assign a failure penalty cost to each maintenance team and then develop their optimal maintenance policy. In this article, the Shapley value is utilized for fair penalty costs allocation to avoid any interest for teams to secede the coalition, whose actual role is to evaluate the criticality level of each component in the context of coalition. Moreover, imperfect inspection and imperfect repair are quite common in practice because of limited resources, technologies and time. To address these practical concerns, a new reliability-centered hybrid preventive maintenance policy is proposed. The optimal inspection interval and age-based replacement interval are determined for each team to minimize the cost rate over an infinite time horizon. Several numerical examples illustrate that the proposed decision-making method is effective in handling such complex maintenance problems involving a coalition of dedicated maintenance teams.