Stochastic models in preventive maintenance policies

In recent decades, philosophy behind maintenance has varied consistently due to the changes in complexity of designs, advances in automation and mechanization, adaptation to the fast growing market demand, commercial computation in the sectors, and environmental issues. In mid-forties, simplicity of designs, limited maintenance opportunities, and immaturity of trade culture made enough to perform only fix it when it broke approach, i.e. corrective maintenance, after failures. Last quarter of the 21th century made essential to constitute more conservative and preventive maintenance policies in order to ensure safety, reliability, and availability of systems with longer lifetime and cost effectiveness. Preventive maintenance can provide an economic saving more than 18% of operating cost of systems. In this basis, various stochastic models were proposed as a tool to constitute a maintenance policy to measure system availability and to obtain optimal maintenance periods. This paper presents a general perspective on common stochastic models in maintenance planning such as Homogenous Poisson Process, Non-Homogenous Poisson Process, and Imperfect Maintenance. The paper also introduces two common maintenance policies, block and age replacement policy, using these stochastic models