Analysis of on-line maintenance strategies for k-out-of-n standby safety systems

The objective of this paper is to compare the performance of three on-line test and maintenance strategies (corrective maintenance, preventive maintenance and predictive maintenance) for standby k-out-of-n safety systems. Each channel of the k-out-of-n system is modelled by an age-dependent unavailability model to reflect the effect of maintenance on the aging process. The system unavailability, the probability of spurious operation and the overall cost under the above maintenance strategies are analyzed and compared to obtain the optimal maintenance strategy. Sensitivity analyses are performed to reveal the effect of different model parameters on the system performance. A standby safety system in Canadian Deuterium–Uranium (CANDU) Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs), the Shutdown System Number One (SDS1), is used to illustrate the proposed analysis and the procedure. It is concluded that maintenance should neither be performed too frequently nor too rarely. When the system deteriorates very slowly, the corrective maintenance is more preferable than the preventive and predictive maintenance. When the failure rate of the system is high, the preventive maintenance results in the best system performance. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.