Group maintenance policy for mechanical products based on age replacement

Systems in engineering field are becoming more and more complex nowadays, so how to exert maintenance support for complex systems is a critical problem. As the failure rate of most mechanical products is based on age, the replacement before the failure occurs is an effective way, by which the failure cost can be avoided, and this policy is called age replacement policy. However, with the systems are much more complicated, age replacement policy for a single component cannot meet the demand for maintenance support of complex systems, so it is necessary to maintain several components simultaneously, and this policy is called group maintenance policyin this paper. Group maintenance policy is of great importance for reducing the start-up cost and improving the availability of the system. In this paper, the method of calculating the optimal time for replacement for a group of components and the condition of the group maintenance policyis the optimal choice are introduced. In last chapter, a simulation software named VISUALSPAR is used to validate the correctness of the method, and a numerical example is presented to explain under what condition the group maintenance policy is the optimal choice.