Optimal repair resource assignment strategy for partial failed systems

The situation that arises in the maintenance of systems which operate continuously and possess limited repair capacity can be modeled. Since the number of available repairmen is less than the number of components, the performance of the system depends on the maintenance policy employed, whenever the number of failed components is greater than the number of available repairmen. Thus it is important to have maintenance policies that yield a maximum value to some relevant measure of system performance. The components in most classic repairman problems can be only in two states, functioning or failed, while failed components are not always totally unusable in practice. The concept of extra cost is introduced to describe the damage caused by this partial failure. In this study, it come up with general rules about how to decide the optimum repairman assignment policy for two types of maintenance service, namely, preemptive and nonpreemptive, in the term of minimizing the average extra cost.