Simulation-based decision making for maintenance policy selection for complex systems

Paper presented to the 4th Annual Symposium on Graduate Research and Scholarly Projects (GRASP) held at the Hughes Metropolitan Complex, Wichita State University, April 25, 2008.Research completed at the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, College of EngineeringThis paper investigates the performance of deteriorating systems maintained under structural constraints using a simulation approach. Three maintenance polices are investigated, and the performance of the system is measured by the steady-state system availability. The best maintenance policy is chosen with the highest steady-state availability. Unlike those widely used methods that treat such systems as continuous-time Markov processes, the proposed simulation model is able to deal with more general failure time and repair time distributions. Moreover, since desirable performance indices can be easily obtained using this method, it will be an effective tool to assist in selecting the optimal maintenance policy for a complex system