A Dynamic Prognostic Maintenance Policy for Multi-Component Systems

Over the past years, diagnosis and prognosis in maintenance are getting more attention. The use of these techniques for maintenance decision making and optimization in multi-component systems is however a still underexplored area. Consequently, this paper presents a dynamic prognostic maintenance policy for multi-component systems that minimizes the long-term expected maintenance cost per unit time. The proposed maintenance policy is classified as a dynamic method, as each time new information on the current degradation of components becomes available; a prediction of remaining useful life (prognostics) for the considered component is performed and the maintenance schedule is updated accordingly. The performance of the developed dynamic prognostic maintenance policy is compared to several maintenance policies in order to quantify the value of using prognostics in maintenance decision making for multi-component systems. Moreover, the effect of different levels of component dependency on the decision making process is investigated.