Periodic imperfect preventive maintenance with two categories of competing failure modes

A maintenance policy is studied for a system with two types of failure modes: maintainable and non-maintainable. The quality of maintenance actions is modelled by its effect on the system failure rate. Preventive maintenance actions restore the system to a condition between as good as new and as bad as immediately before the maintenance action. The model presented permits to study the equipment condition improvement (improvement factor) as a function of the time of the preventive maintenance action. The determination of the maintenance policy, which minimizes the cost rate for an infinite time span, is examined. Conditions are given under which a unique optimal policy exists. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.