A maintenance-focused approach to complex system design

Maintenance plays a critical role in reducing operating cost and maximizing reliability of a complex engineering system. This paper proposes a novel maintenance-focused, system-level design framework that attempts to capture the interactions between maintenance strategies and system-level design parameters overlooked in current modeling approaches. The goal of this maintenance-focused approach is to help designers better understand the interconnectedness of system architecture, choice of maintenance strategy, and uncertainties in a design. Application of the proposed design framework is demonstrated through a case example of a power plant condenser system. Results show that using an integrated approach can reveal the many nonobvious interactions between subsystems, and produce system designs that have lower life-cycle cost compared to traditional sequential design approaches.