Preventive maintenance and replacement scheduling for repairable and maintainable systems using dynamic programming

This paper presents mathematical models and a solution approach to determine the optimal preventive maintenance schedules for a repairable and maintainable series system of components with an increasing rate of occurrence of failure (ROCOF). The maintenance planning horizon has been divided into discrete and equally‐sized periods and in each period, three possible actions for each component (maintain it, replace it, or do nothing) have been considered. The optimal decisions for each component in each period are investigated such that the objectives and the requirements of the system can be achieved. In particular, the cases of minimizing total cost subject to a constraint on system reliability, and maximizing system reliability subject to a budgetary constraint on overall cost have been modeled. As the optimization methodology, dynamic programming combined with branch‐and‐bound method is utilized and the effectiveness of the approach is presented through the use of a numerical example. Such a modeling approach should be useful for maintenance planners and engineers tasked with the problem of developing recommended maintenance plans for complex systems of components.