Optimal Preventive Maintenance Period Research Articles

Optimal periodic preventive maintenance policy for leased equipment

For leased equipment the lessor incurs penalty costs for failures occurring over the lease period and for not rectifying such failures within a specified time limit. Through preventive maintenance actions the penalty costs can be reduced but this is achieved at the expense of increased maintenance costs. The paper looks at a periodic preventive maintenance policy which achieves a tradeoff between the penalty and maintenance costs.

Optimal maintenance policies during the post-warranty period

Abstract This paper develops the optimal periodic preventive maintenance policies following the expiration of warranty. We consider two types of warranty policies to discuss such optimum maintenance policies: renewing warranty and non-renewing warranty. From the user's perspective, the product is maintained free of charge or with prorated cost on failure during the warranty period. However, the users will have to repair or replace the failed product at their own expenses during the post-warranty period. Given the cost structure to the user during the cycle of the product, we derive the expressions for the expected maintenance costs for the periodic preventive maintenance following the expiration of warranty when applying two types of warranty policies and obtain the optimal number and the optimal period for such post-warranty maintenance policies by minimizing the expected long-run maintenance cost per unit time. Explicit solutions for the optimal periodic preventive maintenance are presented for illustrative purposes.

Cost minimization for periodic maintenance policy of a system subject to slow degradation

Abstract This paper considers a repairable system which undergoes preventive maintenance (PM) periodically and is minimally repaired at each failure. Most preventive maintenance models assume that the system improves at each PM so that the hazard rate is reduced to that of a new system or to some specified level. In this paper, we consider the situation where each PM relieves stress temporarily and hence slows the rate of system degradation, while the hazard rate of the system remains monotonically increasing. The optimal number and period for the periodic PM that minimize the expected cost rate per unit time over an infinite time span are obtained. We also consider the case when the minimal repair cost varies with time. Explicit solutions for the optimal periodic PM are given for the Weibull distribution case.

Cost analysis and extension of a simple maintenance-scheduling heuristic

Practitioners of maintenance scheduling sometimes use a simple analytic formula, derived based on inspection scheduling, as a heuristic to determine the length of the preventive maintenance period. The sensitivity of this heuristic solution is analyzed and the cost penalties are calculated compared to the exact solution that utilizes the lifetime distribution in the derivation of the optimal preventive maintenance period. A simple extension of the heuristic is suggested to improve the approximation with a slightly increased computational effort. The sensitivity and cost analysis of the improved heuristic are discussed as well. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.