Optimal maintenance policies for systems subject to a Markovian operating environment

Many stochastic models of repairable equipment deterioration have been proposed based on the physics of failure and the characteristics of the operating environment, but they often lead to time to failure and residual life distributions that are quite complex mathematically. The first objective of our study is to investigate the potential for approximating these distributions with traditional time to failure distribution. We consider a single‐component system subject to a Markovian operating environment such that the system’s instantaneous deterioration rate depends on the state of the environment. The system fails when its cumulative degradation crosses some random threshold. Using a simulation‐based approach, we approximate the time to first failure distribution for this system with a Weibull distribution and assess the quality of this approximation. The second objective of our study is to investigate the cost benefit of applying a condition‐based maintenance paradigm (as opposite to a scheduled maintenance paradigm) to the repairable system of interest. Using our simulation model, we assess the cost benefits resulting from condition‐based maintenance policy, and also the impact of the random prognostic error in estimating system condition (health) on the cost benefits of the condition‐based maintenance policy.