Opportunistic Maintenance Strategy for Complex Equipment with a Genetic Algorithm Considering Failure Dependence: A...

Area of Science:

• Reliability Engineering
• Operations Research
• Maintenance Management

Background:

• Complex multi-component systems necessitate maintenance strategies to manage warranty costs and ensure availability.
• Individual component preventive maintenance can lead to escalating warranty expenses.
• Opportunistic maintenance offers a method to integrate maintenance tasks, reducing costs and improving system uptime.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an optimal opportunistic maintenance scheme for multi-component systems.
• To minimize warranty costs while maximizing system availability.
• To establish a framework for integrating individual component maintenance schedules.

Main Methods:

• Developed failure rate and reliability evaluation models for systems with component failure dependence.
• Determined optimal preventive maintenance plans for individual components to minimize lifecycle cost per unit time.
• Constructed a two-dimensional warranty cost model for multi-component systems based on reliability thresholds for opportunistic maintenance.
• Utilized a genetic algorithm to identify the optimal opportunistic maintenance scheme.

Main Results:

• The proposed opportunistic maintenance scheme reduced warranty costs by 5.5%.
• System availability was improved by 10% through the implementation of the strategy.
• The effectiveness of opportunistic maintenance was validated through experimental analysis on a power transmission device.

Conclusions:

• Opportunistic maintenance is a highly effective strategy for reducing warranty costs in complex multi-component systems.
• The developed models and methods provide a robust approach to optimizing maintenance schedules.
• The study demonstrates significant improvements in both cost-efficiency and system performance.