Optimal Maintenance of Multi-Component Systems: a Review

In this article we give an overview of the literature on multi-component maintenance optimization. We focus on work appearing since the 1991 survey A survey of maintenance models for multi-unit systems by Cho and Parlar (1991). This paper builds forth on the review article by Dekker et al. (1996), which focusses on economic dependence, and the survey of maintenance policies by Wang (2002), in which some group maintenance and some opportunistic maintenance policies are considered. Our classification scheme is primarily based on the dependence between components (stochastic, structural or economic). Next, we also classify the papers on the basis of the planning aspect (short-term vs longterm), the grouping of maintenance activities (either grouping preventive or corrective maintenance, or opportunistic grouping) and the optimization approach used (heuristic, policy classes or exact algorithms). Finally, we also pay attention to the applications of the models.