A periodicity metric for assessing maintenance strategies

Maintenance schemes in manufacturing systems are devised to reset the machines functionality in an economical fashion and keep it within acceptable levels. The notion of periodic functional resetting to reduce complexity has been utilized in this research to introduce and formulate a novel metric to evaluate and quantify function resetting due to a given maintenance policy. The two main parameters are the rate and extent of function resetting. The developed periodicity metric can be used as a criterion for comparing different maintenance policy alternatives and as a tool for predicting system performance under a given maintenance policy. An industrial example is used to illustrate the application of the new metric. The proposed method and metric for assessing maintenance strategies in the functional domain are sufficiently general and can also be applied in other applications that involve system resetting.