Constrained-cost maintenance and measurability of degradation

This paper surveys the recent expansion in the literature on maintenance and repair policies for organizations which have control of a large number of facilities all of which must meet some minimum standard but where there is a limit on the budget. This includes highway authorities, railway companies, and those responsible for bridges. The paper seeks to point out that, in the measurement and classification of the state of the various facilities, there is a need to consider the optimization model that will be used to determine the division of resources between the facilities, as well as considering the problems with the initial inspection which gives the data used in the classification. The paper reviews the different ways the state of the facilities are classified at present and the types of optimization model used. By concentrating on Markov decision-process models for the optimization of the maintenance and repair policy, we look at the properties required from the initial classification process that make the optimization model valid.