| Almost all operational and standby systems need maintenance, yet this is generally overlooked in the stages of design and development. Lately, maintenance has been emphasized by several factors such as rising costs of labor and material, increased complexity of systems and increased quality requirements. The aim of this research is to develop new algorithms and analysis techniques that can be used in a general way to handle optimization of various types of inspection and maintenance schedules of systems subject to stochastic failure. Physical problems of systems in active operation with constant failure rate and increasing failure rate are treated. Examples of such systems are: airborne electronic equipment, radio receivers, aircraft engines, etc. The optimal maintenance schedule incorporates the effects of inspection, maintenance, delayed detection, uptime and downtime costs. The techniques of classical differential calculus and dynamic programming are applied for the development of the optimal maintenance schedule. |
