Condition-based Selective Maintenance Optimization for a Large-scale Non-Markovian System

Abstract

We consider selective maintenance that repairs severely degraded units in the system consisting of massive units. Under the assumption that units degrade independently in a finite number of states, we derive a fluid model that approximates the mean behavior of the system’s health condition. Our simulation study indicates that even if only a subset of units gets repaired, the system would asymptotically become a regenerative process as the maintenance operations are repeated over time. Based on this observation, we optimize the maintenance scheduling that triggers the maintenance operations based on the fraction of units at each degradation state in order to minimize long-run maintenance costs.