Maintenance of continuously monitored degrading systems

This paper considers a condition-based maintenance model for continuously degrading systems under continuous monitoring. After maintenance, the states of the system are randomly distributed with residual damage. We investigate a realistic maintenance policy, referred to as condition-based availability limit policy, which achieves the maximum availability level of such a system. The optimum maintenance threshold is determined using a search algorithm. A numerical example for a degrading system modeled by a Gamma process is presented to demonstrate the use of this policy in practical applications. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.