Modeling changes in maintenance activities through fine-tuning Markov models of ageing equipment

Markov models are well established technique used widely for modeling equipment deterioration. This work presents an approach where Markov models represent equipment ageing and also incorporate various maintenance activities. Having available some basic model representing both deterioration and maintenance processes it is possible to adjust its parameters so that it corresponds to some hypothetical new maintenance policy and then to examine impact that this new policy has on various reliability characteristics of the system. The paper presents a method of model adjustment and discusses implementation of three numerical algorithms solving the problem of parameter approximation. A practical example confirms validity of the approach and illustrates its efficiency.