Optimizing maintenance policies based on discrete event simulation and the OCBA mechanism

In an age of high competition, strict safety and environmental regulations, maintenance which acted as an effective tool to improve system availability so as to increase profit margin has played an important role in modern industry. In this paper, the system costs (availability) are estimated by the discrete event simulation technique and the Optimal Computing Budget Allocation (OCBA) mechanism is implemented to try to find the optimal maintenance policies for the system. The OCBA is an effective algorithm that can identify the optimal maintenance policies while significantly improving the simulation efficiency. The main purpose of this article is to validate the efficiency of this method in the application of maintenance policy optimization. An example taken from literature is presented to show the effectiveness of this method.