A Study On The Maintenance Policy Of A Two-component System With Failure Interaction And External Shocks

The existing research of maintenance policies for multi-component systemusually deals with failure interaction and external shocks separately, among whichmainly consider the external shocks arriving in a Homogeneous Poison Process,which doesn’t conform to the actual situation. What’s more, the mostly used agereplacement policy can lead to excessive maintenance and deficient maintenance. Inorder to get the optimal preventive maintenance policy for the multi-componentsystem, a two-component serial system is considered. According to the maintenancepractice and the system characteristics, both of the failure interaction and externalshocks are taken into consideration, what’s more, the external shocks arrive in aNon-Homogeneous Poison Process. First, the age replacement policy is introduced tothis two-component system, under this policy, a mathematic model is derived from thetheory of renewal process, which is used to evaluate the maintenance effectiveness. Then,a numeric example is given to illustrate the influence brought by the model factors.After this, based on the previous age replacement policy, the opportunisticmaintenance policy is also introduced to this system. The new model consists of bothof these two maintenance policies. The optimal opportunistic maintenance thresholdvalue is calculated using the previous optimal replacement period results, then thesetwo maintenance policies are compared according to the cost rate. Through thisresearch, the following three conclusions are obtained.First, the failure rate of the short lifetime component in the two-componentsystem exerts a larger effectiveness to the optimal maintenance results than the failurerate scale coefficient; second, the system will suffer more maintenance cost becauseof external shocks; what’s more, compared with the age replacement policy,opportunistic maintenance policy shows lower maintenance cost, this reveals that theopportunistic maintenance policy is better than the age replacement policy whenapplied to the multi-component system.