Closed-form analytical results for condition-based maintenance

Preventive maintenance is applied to improve the device availability or decrease the repair costs when the device failures are in deterioration (or aging) phase. Preventive maintenance can be made more efficient by periodic monitoring wherein the state of deterioration can be assessed. This leads to the notion of condition-based maintenance. In this paper, we study the condition-based maintenance, and derive closed-form expressions of system availability when the device undergoes both deterioration as well as Poisson type failures. These closed-form solutions enable us to find faster algorithms to determine the optimal inspection policy. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.