Condition based maintenance: accurate, simple, and optimized solution approach

Condition based maintenance recommends maintenance actions based on the monitoring of condition data that describe the actual systems state. In this project, we consider a component exhibiting a continuous monotone degradation such corrosion and fatigue in physical structures. The degradation process is uncertain and includes randomness. The condition maintenance policy follows the control limit policy with a preventive, a switching limit, and a given failure limit. We propose to introduce the switching limit with value smaller than the preventive limit to trigger frequent inspections for (close) worn-out system. Our objective is to minimize the annual average maintenance cost subject to a constraint on the minimum average availability. The decision variables are the preventive limit, the switching limit, and the time between inspections. In the literature, the exact analysis of such policies are numerically involved and not suitable for what-if scenarios and optimisation. In this proposal, we plan to close this gap by proposing simple and accurate approximations to facilitate the optimisation and the adoption in practice