Optimal Reliability Allocation Under Preventive Maintenance Schedule

This paper considers a series system of components with time-dependent reliability and gives a new formulation of an optimal reliability allocation problem where an optimal preventive maintenance (PM) schedule is determined simultaneously. The importance of this formulation is shown in comparison with a conventional formulation where PM schedule is not taken into account. The optimization problem becomes a nonlinear mixed-integer programming problem. A simple approximate solution algorithm is given on the basis of a nonlinear programming (NLP) algorithm. The procedure is illustrated by use of a numerical example. Though we restrict our attention to the case where a preventive replacement is adopted as a PM policy, a similar discussion is possible for the as-good-as-new repair.