Vasiliy Krivtsov

Complex technical systems, over their design life, are subject to preventive maintenance. Viewed as a field service activity, preventive maintenance is necessary to meet a system's reliability and availability (readiness) requirements. The question is what should be the optimal schedule of such preventive maintenance actions? Optimal in the sense that high frequency of these actions increases the cost of maintaining the system's operation but reduces the cost due to the system's downtime, while low frequency – decreases the cost system's operation but increases the cost of downtime. Another criterion for optimal schedule can be based upon minimization of downtime duration as opposed to downtime cost. This presentation reviews mathematical (statistical) models that are used for preventive maintenance optimization. The discussion is illustrated by case studies from the author’s corporate and consulting experience.