Outsourcing selective maintenance problem in failure prone multi-component systems

In many industrial settings, there are systems designed to perform consecutive missions interspersed with finite breaks during which only a set of component repairs can be carried out due to limited time, budget, or resources. The decision maker then has to decide which components to repair in order to guarantee a given performance level. This is known as the selective maintenance problem (SMP). This paper introduces a new variant of the SMP by specifically taking into account the maintenance outsourcing alternative. A novel integrated non-linear programming formulation where both the in-house and outsourcing maintenance alternatives are accounted for is developed and optimally solved. The effect of the outsourcing alternative on maintenance decisions is investigated through numerical experiments. The overall results obtained demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved