An Opportunistic Maintenance Policy of Multi-unit Series Production System with Consideration of Imperfect Maintenance

This paper proposes an opportunistic maintenance policy for the multi-unit series production system. This proposed maintenance policy is on the basis of the failure rate analysis, which is more realistic than age-based or time-based opportunistic replacement models. When a system halts for performing preventive maintenance or opportunistic maintenance, the alternative decision of replacement and repair is made by economic evaluation of these two types of maintenance actions. The optimal preventive maintenance plans in a finite time horizon can be obtained by adjusting the preventive maintenance threshold and opportunistic maintenance threshold. A numerical example is given for illustrating the applications of the proposed policy.