We study joint preventive maintenance (PM) and production policies for an unreliable production-inventory system in which maintenance/repair times are non-negligible and stochastic. A joint policy decides (a) whether or not to perform PM, and (b) if PM is not performed, then how much to produce. We consider a discrete-time system, formulating the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) model...

We analyze a system of N components with dependent failure times. The goal is to obtain the optimal block replacement interval (different for each component) over a finite horizon that minimizes the expected total maintenance cost. In addition, we allow each preventive maintenance action to change the future joint failure time distribution. We illustrate our methodology with an example from Sou...

A monitored system consists of a core system and its monitor. A core system follows a general life time distribution, but its state, good or not good, cannot be observed directly. In order to infer the state of the core system, we use the information from the monitor whose states are stochasticalIy related to the states of the core system. Using its information, we make the maintenance policy f...

A maintenance policy is studied for a system with two types of failure modes: maintainable and non-maintainable. The quality of maintenance actions is modelled by its effect on the system failure rate. Preventive maintenance actions restore the system to a condition between as good as new and as bad as immediately before the maintenance action. The model presented permits to study the equipment...

Many different types of preventive maintenance policy have been defined in the literature and implemented in reliability practice. However, almost all models, procedures, and approaches deal only with the case when items come from homogeneous populations. In this paper, we analyze the effect of preventive maintenance on the reliability characteristics of items selected from heterogeneous popula...