Optimal policy study on reliability-centered preventive maintenance for a single-equipment system

Because of demanding higher operational efficiency and safety in industrial systems, system maintenance trends to the direction of high speed, high load and high automation. Reliability-centered preventive maintenance schedule plays an important role in production, but it is always a complex task to make such a plan. In this paper, the optimization of reliability-centered preventive maintenance (PM) for a single-equipment system can be proposed. In order to reduce downtime loss, several PM actions are performed together using the threshold for opportunity PM. By using Markov decision process method, the transition probability matrix for different PM actions can be obtained, and then the optimal combination problem on PM strategy can be developed. Finally, the optimal PM schedule which can provide the desired levels of reliability to a single-component system and minimize maintenance cost can be obtained. A case is used to demonstrate the implementation and potential applications of the proposed method.