An Optimal Preventive Maintenance Model for a Structure

Jet engines are critical assets in aircraft, and their availability is crucial in the modern aircraft industry. Therefore, their maintenance scheduling is one of the major tasks an airline has to make during an engine’s lifetime. A proper engine maintenance schedule can significantly reduce maintenance costs without compromising the aircraft's reliability and safety. Different maintenance scheduling approaches have been used for jet engines, such as corrective, preventive, and predictive maintenance strategies. Regarding the safety demands in aircraft industries, preventive maintenance is a frequent maintenance method for jet engines. However, preventive maintenance schedules are often use fixed maintenance intervals, which is usually suboptimal. This paper focuses on minimizing a jet engine's overall maintenance cost by optimizing its preventive maintenance schedule based on an engine’s comprehensive reliability model. A hierarchical optimization framework including the golden section search and genetic algorithms is applied to find the optimal set of preventive maintenance number and their times and the components to be replaced at those times during the jet engine's overall lifetime. The Monte Carlo simulation is used to estimate the engine’s failure times using their lifetime distributions from the reliability model. The estimated failure times are then used to determine the engine's overall corrective and preventive maintenance costs during its lifetime. Finally, an optimal preventive maintenance schedule is proposed for an RB 211 jet engine using the presented method. In the end, comparing the proposed method's overall maintenance cost with two other maintenance methods demonstrates the proposed schedule's effectiveness. The method presented in this paper is generic, and it can be used for other similar engineering systems.

An oil and gas company has 2,268 oil and gas wells. Well Barrier Element (WBE) is installed in a well to protect human, prevent asset damage and minimize harm to the environment. The primary WBE component is Surface Controlled Subsurface Safety Valve (SCSSV). The secondary WBE component is Christmas Tree Valves that consist of four valves i.e. Lower Master Valve (LMV), Upper Master Valve (UMV), Swab Valve (SV) and Wing Valve (WV). Current practice on WBE Preventive Maintenance (PM) program is conducted by considering the suggested schedule as stated on manual. Corrective Maintenance (CM) program is conducted when the component fails unexpectedly. Both PM and CM need cost and may cause production loss. This paper attempts to analyze the failure data and reliability based on historical data. Optimal PM interval is determined in order to minimize the total cost of maintenance per unit time. The optimal PM interval for SCSSV is 730 days, LMV is 985 days, UMV is 910 days, SV is 900 days and WV is 780 days. In average of all components, the cost reduction by implementing the suggested interval is 52%, while the reliability is improved by 4% and the availability is increased by 5%.

PurposeThis paper aims to propose an approach for the optimization of imperfect preventive maintenance and corrective actions performed on a single machine. After maintenance, the machine returns to an age between “as good as new” and “as bad as old”.Design/methodology/approachThe approach is based on fuzzy logic and simulation‐based optimization. Fuzzy logic is preferred over crisp logic because it is relatively easy to implement in this situation considering that the human factor is hardly interpreted by analytical methods because of its unpredictable nature. Simulation‐based optimization is used to have a more reactive and accurate tool for practitioners.FindingsTaking into account the impact of the imperfections due to human factors, the period for preventive maintenance, which minimizes the expected cost rate per unit of time or maximizes the availability of the system, is evaluated by the simulation‐based optimization.Research limitations/implicationsDifferent and more realistic maintenance levels must be considered and the traceability of a specific system could be used to determine the most appropriate failure law. For this study, cost reduction was considered as the priority, but the model can be adjusted according to the user's preferences.Practical implicationsThis paper considers a single repairable machine as a system that undergoes periodic preventive and corrective maintenance actions. Considering maintenance imperfections, rule‐based fuzzy logic can be integrated into the maintenance program to determine the times for the periodic preventive maintenance actions.Originality/valueConsidering human factors in maintenance programs is indispensable to assure more accurate and realistic results. However, due to the difficulty engendered by their modeling, most theoretical maintenance models do not consider these factors. Therefore, the proposed fuzzy model in the paper can be an important tool to include them.

In response to the urgent need for sustainable energy, this study addresses a critical challenge in wind turbine optimization. It focuses on developing a nuanced preventive maintenance strategy to minimize costs and mitigate energy losses. Within this framework, our paper introduces a novel approach employing a Monte Carlo simulation to identify the optimal preventive maintenance frequency, striking a balance between cost efficiency and energy loss mitigation. The results show, that grouped maintenance approach, pinpointing an optimal frequency of 93 months. This strategic configuration minimizes costs to $9997 while concurrently maintaining an average energy loss of 32.014 MWh, resulting in a notable 4.29% increase in total energy production. Variability analysis reveals that increasing maintenance frequency reduces cost fluctuations, while energy loss remains relatively stable. These findings elucidate the interplay among preventive maintenance strategies, cost, and reliability in the realm of wind turbine performance optimization

PurposeWhile steady-state analysis is useful, it does not consider the inherent transient characteristics of repairable systems' behavior, especially in systems that have relatively short life spans, or when their transient behavior is of special concern such as the motivating example used in this paper, military systems. Therefore, a maintenance policy that considers both transient and steady-state availability and aims to achieve the best trade-off between high steady-state availability and rapid stabilization is essential.Design/methodology/approachThis paper studies the transient behavior of system availability under the Kijima Type II virtual age model. While such systems achieve steady-state availability, and it has been proved that deploying preventive maintenance (PM) can significantly improve its steady-state availability, this improvement often comes at the price of longer and increased fluctuating transient behavior, which affects overall system performance. The authors present a methodology that identifies the optimal PM policy that achieves the best trade-off between high steady-state availability and rapid stabilization based on cost-availability analysis.FindingsWhen the proposed simulation-based optimization and cost analysis methodology is applied to the motivating example, it produces an optimal PM policy that achieves an availability–variability balance between transient and steady-state system behaviors. The optimal PM policy produces a notably lower availability coefficient of variation (by 11.5%), while at the same time suffering a negligible limiting availability loss of only 0.3%. The new optimal PM policy also provides cost savings of about 5% in total maintenance cost. The performed sensitivity analysis shows that the system's optimal maintenance cost is sensitive to the repair time, the shape parameter of the Weibull distribution and the downtime cost, but is robust with respect to changes in the remaining parameters.Originality/valueMost of the current maintenance models emphasize the steady-state behavior of availability and neglect its transient behavior. For some systems, using steady-state availability as the sole metric for performance is not adequate, especially in systems that have relatively short life spans or when their transient behavior affects the overall performance. However, little work has been done on the transient analysis of such systems. In this paper, the authors aim to fill this gap by emphasizing such systems and applications where transient behavior is of critical importance to efficiently optimize system performance. The authors use military systems as a motivating example.

Two-stage maintenance of a production system with exponentially distributed On- and Off-periods

Optimal preventive maintenance policy of the balanced system under the semi-Markov model

Opportunistic preventive maintenance scheduling for multi-unit reusable rocket engine system based on the variable maintenance task window method

Manufacturing costs are reduced significantly with the integrated optimization of preventive maintenance and quality control. In this paper, a new mixed integer non-linear programming model is presented. This model determines the optimal preventive maintenance interval and the optimal parameters of the ( ) control chart, including the sampling interval and the sample size and the control limit. The production system is considered in the form of a continuous time Markov chain. Formulation of the production process of a machine in the form of a continuous time Markov chain is a breakthrough in the integrated modeling of repair and quality. The goal is to reduce costs per unit time. It is assumed that preventive maintenance can be carried out at several levels either perfect or imperfect. The duration of corrective and preventive maintenance is not negligible. Considering the length of time for maintenance, this model is closer to the real production environment. A numerical example is used to illustrate this new model. Sensitivity analysis was performed to determine the effect of the model parameters on optimal decisions. This analysis further shows the relationship between preventive maintenance and statistical quality control as well as the performance of the new model.

The preventive maintenance (PM) is scheduled periodically to restore the system condition. However, PM activities cannot generally restore the system to as good as new condition but in an intermediate situation, which is called imperfect PM. The PM interval optimization is useful for improving system reliability. A popular approach to optimization interval is minimizing the maintenance costs. The goal of this work is to obtain optimal PM intervals that minimize expected cost considered PM imperfect, in other words we obtain the optimal PM intervals assuming that the PM action restores the system operating state to be somewhere between as good as new and as bad as old. The results are applied in a real data and the PM is maintained at a decreasing sequence of intervals, which is more practical since most systems need more frequent maintenance with increased usage and age. Furthermore consider a wrong PM perfect hypotheses increase the maintenance cost substantially.

An optimal dynamic interval preventive maintenance scheduling for series systems

We propose optimal preventive maintenance strategies for n-component coherent systems. We assume that in the early time of the system operation all failed components are repaired, such that the state of a failed component gets back to a working state, worse than that of prior to failure. To model this repair action, we utilize a counting process on the interval known as the generalized Pólya process (which subsumes the non-homogeneous Poisson process as a special case). Two generalized Pólya process-based repair strategies are proposed. The criteria to be optimized are the cost function formulated based on the repair costs of the components/system, and the system availability, to obtain the optimal time of preventive maintenance of the system. To illustrate the theoretical results, two coherent systems are studied for which the optimal preventive maintenance times are explored under different conditions.

Optimal preventive maintenance policy for leased equipment using failure rate reduction

A new approach to optimal maintenance of multicomponent systems (networks) is suggested. It is applied to systems subject to external shock processes. Signatures are used for description of systems structures and for dealing with the corresponding optimal maintenance problems. The number of shocks experienced by a system defines a discrete parameter for minimization of the long‐run costs per unit of time and is viewed as an alternative scale. The optimal preventive maintenance is performed either after the shock with the obtained optimal number or the corrective maintenance (replacement) of the whole failed system occurs, whichever comes first. A numerical example is considered and the comparison with the age‐based preventive maintenance is performed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Bayesian failure-rate modeling and preventive maintenance optimization