Opportunistic preventive maintenance scheduling for a multi-unit series system based on dynamic programming

It is understood that for a multi-unit Series system, whenever one of the units stops to perform a preventive maintenance (PM) action, the whole series system must be stopped. At that time PM opportunities arise for the other units in the system. This paper proposes an Opportunistic PM scheduling algorithm for the multi-unit series system based on dynamic programming with the integration of the imperfect effect into maintenance actions. An optimal maintenance practice is determined by maximizing the short-term cumulative opportunistic maintenance cost savings for the whole system. Matlab is considered for the optimization which is based on numerical simulation. Numerical examples are given throughout to show how this approach works. Finally, a comparison between the proposed PM model and other models is given. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.