Optimal Selective Maintenance Strategy for Multi-State Systems Under Imperfect Maintenance

Abstract—Many systems are required to perform a series of mis-sions with finite breaks between any two consecutive missions. In such a case, one of the most widely used maintenance policies is a selective maintenance in which a subset of feasible maintenance ac-tions is chosen to be performed with the aim at achieving the subse-quent mission success under limited maintenance resources. Tradi-tional selective maintenance optimization reported in the literature only focuses on binary state systems. Most systems in industrial ap-plications, however, have more than two states in the deterioration process. In this work, a selective maintenance policy for multi-state systems (MSS) consisting of binary state elements is investigated. Taking the imperfect maintenance quality into consideration, the Kijima model is reviewed, and a cost-maintenance quality rela-tionship which considers the age reduction factor as a function in terms of maintenance cost is established. Moreover, with the as