Optimal corrective maintenance contract planning for aging multi‐state system

This paper considers an aging multi‐state system, where the system failure rate varies with time. After any failure, maintenance is performed by an external repair team. Repair rate and cost of each repair are determined by a corresponding corrective maintenance contract with a repair team. The service market can provide different kinds of maintenance contracts to the system owner, which also can be changed after each specified time period. The owner of the system would like to determine a series of repair contracts during the system life cycle in order to minimize the total expected cost while satisfying the system availability. Operating cost, repair cost and penalty cost for system failures should be taken into account. The paper proposes a method for determining such optimal series of maintenance contracts. The method is based on the piecewise constant approximation for an increasing failure rate function in order to assess lower and upper bounds of the total expected cost and system availability by using Markov models. The genetic algorithm is used as the optimization technique. Numerical example is presented to illustrate the approach. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.