Preventive maintenance modeling for multi-component systems with considering stochastic failures and disassembly sequence

The existed PM (preventive maintenance) efforts on multi-component systems usually ignore the PM opportunities at the component failure moments and the structure dependence among the system components. In this paper, a time window based PM model is proposed for multi-component systems with the stochastic failures and the disassembly sequence involved. Whenever one of the system components stochastically fails or reaches its reliability threshold, PM opportunities arise for other system components. A Monte-Carlo based algorithm is built up to simulate the stochastic failures and then to calculate the cumulative maintenance cost of the system. The optimal PM practice is obtained by minimizing the cumulative maintenance cost throughout the given time horizon. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the calculation process and the availability of the proposed PM model. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.