A value-based preventive maintenance policy for multi-component system with continuously degrading components

A dynamic preventive maintenance policy for system with continuously degrading components is investigated in this paper. Different from traditional cost-centric preventive maintenance policy, our maintenance strategy is formulated from the value perspective. Component value is modelled as a function of component reliability distribution. Maintenance action is triggered whenever the system reliability drops below a certain threshold. Our policy mainly consists of two steps: (i) determine which component to maintain; (ii) determine to what degree the component should be maintained. In Step 1, we introduce the yield-cost importance to select the most important component. In Step 2, the optimal maintenance level is obtained by maximizing the net value of the maintenance action. Finally, numerical examples are given to illustrate the proposed policy.