Preventive repair policy for a system with minor failure and catastrophic failure

Abstract

The paper studies a preventive maintenance system with multiple failures. Assume that the system has two types of failure. One is minor failure that the system will be replaced after the Nth failure. The other is catastrophic failure that the system is removed by replacement. Assume that the preventive repair is performed when the operating time reaches a fixed time T. The preventive repair of the system is “as good as new” which means the system will be restored as the initial state after the completion of last failure. Based on these assumptions, a preventive repair policy about the fixed-length time and the number of minor failures will be built. An optimal replacement (T, N)* can be determined by minimizing the average cost rate. Finally, we give a numerical example to verify that the policy is effective.

Keywords:

• Geometric process
• Renewal reward theorem
• Preventive repair