Optimal variability sensitive condition-based maintenance with a Cox PH model

Abstract

Condition based maintenance (CBM) is an important maintenance strategy in practice. In this paper, we propose a CBM method to effectively incorporate system health observations into maintenance decision making to minimise the total maintenance cost and cost variability. In this method, the system degradation process is described by a Cox PH model and the proposed framework includes simulation of failure process and maintenance policy optimisation using adaptive nested partition with sequential selection (ANP-SS) method, which can adaptively select or create the most promising region of candidates to improve the efficiency. Different from existing CBM strategies, the proposed method relaxes some restrictions on the system degradation model and taking the cost variation as one of the optimisation objectives. A real industry case study is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Keywords:

• condition-based maintenance
• variability-sensitive decision making
• simulation optimisation

Acknowledgement

The financial support of this work is provided by NSF grants #0757683 and #0758178, and GE Healthcare.