A two-stage preventive maintenance policy for a multi-state deterioration system

This paper is to propose a two-stage preventive maintenance (PM) policy for the multi-state deterioration system under periodic inspection and with multiple candidate actions for PM. Such policy is mainly to schedule PM optimally and also on how to choose the action optimally for each PM. The scheduling includes two tasks: to determine after completing each PM when to make the decision and then at it to schedule the next PM optimally. We assume that: (1) such actions except replacement are imperfect, (2) the inspection and action times can be ignored, (3) the system can be modeled by a multistate discrete time Markov chain whose transition probabilities will change and be updated only at the instant after completing each PM, and (4) the risks of such imperfect actions will be updated only at the instant after completing each PM. Finally, an example through simulation is presented to illustrate how such policy can be carried out. & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.