Joint predictive maintenance and inventory strategy for multi-component systems using Birnbaum's structural importance

Maintenance and inventory optimizations are two interrelated processes but often investigated separately in the literature. Joint optimization of these processes can reduce the total maintenance and inventory cost, it may however lead to a complex problem with a large numbers of decision parameters to be optimized. To face this open issue, in this paper, we present a joint predictive maintenance and inventory strategy for systems with complex structure and multiple non-identical components. Both predictive maintenance and spare parts provisioning operations are studied and optimized jointly. The prognostic condition index and the structural importance measure of components are jointly used to build the thresholds for preventive maintenance and spare part ordering. Additionally, in order to take the advantages of economic dependence, opportunistic maintenance decision rules based on the criticality level of components and their spare parts availability are proposed. To evaluate the proposed joint strategy, a cost model taking into account the economic dependence of both maintenance and inventory activities is developed. A numerical study of a 7-component system is finally presented to illustrate the use and the advantages of the proposed strategy. Indeed, this strategy shows the flexibility and the efficiency in joint maintenance and inventory optimization.