Optimal Periodic Maintenance Policy under the Arithmetic Reduction Age Imperfect Repair Model

This paper presents the preliminary results of a research work on procedures for the determination of optimal maintenace policies under imperfect repair assumption. The topic was motivated by a real data set on failures of off-road trucks used by a mining company. In particular, it is discussed the determination and practical implementation of an optimal preventive maintenance policy using the ARA-1 (Arithmetic Reduction of Age) model presented by Doyen and Gaudoin (2004). Under such imperfect repair models, the expected number of failures (or mean function) at time t is given by a general renewal function with no closed form solution available. In this work, two procedures to approximate the mean function are proposed. Optimal periodic maintenance policies are obtained for the off-road trucks engines, using the the ARA-1 model and the two proposed approximation procedures.