Opportunistic maintenance and optimisation considering external opportunities

This thesis proposed a novel Opportunistic Maintenance policy where uncertain and uncontrollable maintenance opportunities and the benefits may arrive from sources external to a production system. Optimisation models were developed and analysed for both time- and condition-based approaches with the impact of using short-term forecasts of external opportunities. The new models could result in significant savings in maintenance costs that are demonstrated using numerical examples and real case studies in energy systems for different industries. This thesis discussed special "cost-free" maintenance opportunities, which are prevalent in solar energy systems where rain events can provide free cleaning of solar collectors