A joint optimal policy of inspection and age based replacement based on a three-stage failure process

Preventive maintenance (PM) and condition-based maintenance (CBM) are two dominant maintenance policies in industrial applications. Inspection activities are the foundation of PM and CBM policies as to provide the operating information of system through processing the collected vibration data. Age based replacement is one of the most used preventive maintenance policy aiming at avoiding unplanned downtime and higher failure loss. This paper proposes a joint optimal policy of inspection and age based replacement based on a three-stage failure process for a single component system. The three-stage failure process, which is closer to reality, divides the failure process of system into three stages: namely normal, minor defective and severe defective. When the severe defective stage is identified, maintenance action is carried out immediately. The system is replaced once it reaches certain age. However, two potential actions are considered and analyzed in this paper when the minor defective stage is identified: halving the subsequent inspection interval or replacing the item immediately. As inspection may not be perfect because of the complexity of plant items, both perfect and imperfect inspection cases are considered. Finally, a case study is presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed models