An intelligent opportunistic maintenance (OM) system: A genetic algorithm approach

Complex systems like aircrafts, space shuttles, nuclear power stations, and some complicated process industries operate under high reliability and safety requirements due to the complicated technology involved and hazardous consequences to the larger community in case of failures. The maintenance regime of complex systems most often consists of a variety of maintenance strategies, like preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, condition-based maintenance and so on. Opportunistic or opportunity-based maintenance (OM) gives the maintenance staff an opportunity to replace or repair those items, which are found to be defective or needs replacement in the immediate future, during the maintenance of a machine or component. This work presents an intelligent method of how to decide whether a particular item requires opportunistic maintenance or not, and if so how cost effective this opportunity-based maintenance will be when compared to a probable future grounding. This maintenance strategy is considered important when dealing with complex systems that contain expensive items with hard lives with condition-based maintenance (CBM) strategies. Genetic algorithms (GA) are employed to decide whether opportunistic maintenance is cost effective or not. An example of applying opportunistic maintenance strategy in process industry is used to describe the methodology for genetic algorithms.