Optimal planning of life-depleting maintenance activities

This article considers a system with a deterministic initial lifetime that generates reward at a decreasing rate as its virtual age increases. Maintenance can be performed to reduce the virtual age of the system; however, maintenance also shortens the remaining lifetime of the system. Given this tradeoff, the lifetime reward-maximizing maintenance policies under perfect maintenance for non-failure-prone systems, and both perfect and imperfect maintenance for failure-prone systems are analyzed. For each combination considered, structural properties of the resulting optimal policies are derived and exploited to develop solution techniques. Insightful numerical examples are also provided.