Optimal Preventive Maintenance Policy Based on Aperiodic Model

Preventive maintenance(PM) is an action taken on a repairable system while it is still operating, which needs to be carried out in order to keep the system at the desired level of successful operation. The PM improves the reliability of the system by predicting the possible failures and thereby preventing such failures from its occurrence. In this paper, we develop the optimal preventive maintenance policies based on the aperiodic PM model. We investigate an aperiodic preventive maintenance policy and propose several optimal PM policies which minimize the expected cost over an infinite time span. Park, Jung and Yum(2000) determine the optimal period and the optimal number of PMs based on Canfield's(1986) periodic model. Our techniques to derive the optimal preventive maintenance policies based on our aperiodic PM model is similar to those in Park, Jung and Yum(2000), which can be considered as the special case of our results.