Maintenance cost optimization for multiple components using a condition based method

Since maintenance planning directly affect the availability and the lifecycle cost of components and systems, it has become a topic of great interest among researchers and industry practitioners in recent years. Preventive maintenance techniques can be adopted in order to determine a convenient maintenance schedule, reducing the number of unexpected failure events. The implementation of a preventive maintenance approach may also provide other benefits such as increase in equipment availability, reduction in maintenance costs and increase in equipment lifetime. In this scenario, the application of PHM (Prognostics and Health Monitoring) techniques can be thought as a powerful tool to support the implementation of a CBM (Condition Based Maintenance) approach. The problem of CBM optimization can be formulated as finding the optimum maintenance schedule for a set of components so that the average maintenance cost per unit of time is minimized. In this paper, a maintenance cost optimization method for multiple components is presented. The proposed method uses information on the health condition of each component and takes into account the economic benefits of repairing multiple components at the same time instead of scheduling maintenance interventions for different components in different time instants, based on individual optimization recommendations. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the application of the proposed method.