Logical Representation of Maintenance Procedures for Verification and Analysis

This paper describes a methodology using Petri nets, multi-valued logic and simulation to validate the correctness and measure the performance of maintenance procedure designs. A maintenance procedure design specifies a sequence of tasks for diagnosing faults, restoring availability or extending the time to failure for a particular hardware system. These procedures can be complex if they feature multiple possible task outcomes, concurrent task execution and application to multi-component multi-state hardware systems. The modelling language provides a means of testing the design of such procedures to ensure they are completely specified and optimised for efficient performance in terms of achieving desired outcomes, completion time, resource usage and safety.