On the Use of Mean Residual Life as a Condition Index for Condition-Based Maintenance Decision-Making

This paper provides a methodology to analyze the efficiency of mean residual life in condition-based maintenance decision-making. A degradation-threshold-dependent-shock model is used to describe the evolution of a system subject to the dependent and competing failure modes due to degradation and shock. Based on this model, we compute the mean residual life of system and analyze its monotonicity. This property of mean residual life function allows introducing a new condition-based maintenance strategy whose preventive maintenance decision is based on the mean residual life. The proposed strategy is then compared to a maintenance strategy based on the degradation level only. Analyzing the equivalence, the performance and the flexibility of both strategies allow us to give some conclusions on the interest of the mean residual life as a condition index for maintenance decision-making.