Optimisation of the reliability based preventive maintenance strategy.

The Reliability Based Preventive Maintenance (RBPM) strategy is commonly used in industry to improve the reliability of engineering assets. In RBPM, a reliability threshold is predefined for a particular engineering asset. Whenever the reliability of the asset falls to this level, a preventive maintenance action is conducted to improve the asset΄s reliability. As preventive maintenance is costly, finding optimal RBPM strategies for engineering assets, especially over a long term with multiple maintenance cycles, is of strategic importance to their owners, so as to increase their market competitiveness. Selecting an optimal RBPM strategy usually involves finding an optimal reliability threshold which enables the total expected cost, including repair cost, preventive maintenance cost and production loss, to be minimised. A number of factors such as required minimal mission time, customer satisfaction, human resources and acceptable risk levels can limit the ability of an organisation to achieve this objective. These factors are usually termed as constraints and have different influences on decision making. However, an effective tool which enables industries to make optimal RBPM decisions with consideration of the effects of these factors is still lacking. To address this issue, here we investigate these factors and identify critical constraints. Furthermore we develop an effective approach for determining the optimal RBPM strategy within the identified multiple constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]