Component redundancy allocation in optimal cost preventive maintenance scheduling

This work presents a methodology to assess maintenance teams in the determination of the degree of redundancy that an active component must have in order to minimize its system life-cycle cost and in the definition of the corresponding maintenance plan schedule. The minimal required data are three average costs and one reliability function. It is useful in a system’s design phase, since in this situation data is usually scarce or inaccurate, but can also be applied in the exploration phase. It is an adaptation of the classical Optimal Age Replacement method combined with a redundancy allocation problem. A set of simple illustrative examples covering a variety of operating conditions is presented, demonstrating quantitatively the applicability to a range of maintenance optimization decisions.