Analysis of maintenance policies for M machines with deteriorating performance

In this paper, we consider the maintenance scheduling of a group of M identical machines, the performance of which deteriorates with usage. Examples of such situations are frequently found in the heavy machine tooling, petro-chemical and semi-conductor industries among others. Assuming a limited maintenance resource and that the maintenance times are i.i.d., we propose a dynamic maintenance policy which utilizes the information about the number of operating machines and their ages. We analyze the system for the special cases of constant and exponentially distibuted maintenance times. We investigate the impact of maintenance time variability on system performance and evaluate the performance of various maintenance policies within the proposed policy class when the expected profit rate is maximized.