Preventive maintenance in a 1 out of n system: The uptime, downtime and costs

In repairable systems with redundancy, failed units can be replaced by spare units in order to reduce the system downtime. The failed units are sent to a repair shop or manufacturer for corrective maintenance and subsequently are returned for re-use. In this paper we consider a 1 out of n system with cold standby and we assume that repaired units are ''as good as new''. When a unit has an increasing failure rate it can be advantageous to perform preventive maintenance in order to return it to its ''as good as new'' state, because preventive maintenance will take less time and tends to be cheaper. In the model we present we use age-replacement; a machine is taken out for preventive maintenance and replaced by a standby one if its age has reached a certain value, T-pm. In this paper we derive an approximation scheme to compute the expected uptime, the expected downtime and the expected costs per time unit of the system, given the total number of units and the age-replacement value, T-pm. Consequently the number of units and the value T-pm can be determined for maximum long-term economy. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.