Maintenance policy performance assessment in presence of imprecision based on Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence

The aim of this work is to assess the performance of a maintenance policy when a stochastic model of the life of the component of interest is known, but relies on parameters that are imprecisely known, and only through information elicited from experts. The case in which the information used to feed the model comes from a single expert has been investigated by the authors in a previous work. This paper deals with the different situation in which a number of experts are involved in the elicitation of the uncertain parameters; in particular, each expert provides an interval he/she believes containing the unknown value of the parameter which he/she is knowledgeable about. The different type of available information calls for the development of a different method to represent and propagate the associated uncertainty. Resorting to Probability theory to address this issue is questionable. Then, a technique based on the Dempster Shafer Theory of Evidence (DSTE) is embraced in this work, which allows facing a practical case study concerning the check valve of a turbo-pump lubricating system in a Nuclear Power Plant. The output of such method consists of couples of Lower and Upper 'cumulative distributions describing the uncertainty in the maintenance performance indicators of interest (i.e., unavailability and costs), which accounts for both the aleatory and epistemic contributions. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.