Reliability and preventive maintenance analysis of Weibull distributed lifetime systems

This paper deals with the reliability and maintenance analysis of a system whose lifetime is a three parameter Weibull distributed. The main objectives of the present work are on one hand to identify the critical date, beyond which, it would be difficult to predict the system reliability. On the other hand, a risk analysis is made with respect to the case where the date of preventive maintenance is delayed until the critical date. According to such analysis, it is shown that there is an age interval where the preventive maintenance should be able to be delayed with a weak failure risk. It is also shown that the shape parameter of the Weibull distribution controls the decision of the delay preventive maintenance. At the end, an abacus is provided to figure out the drawback of the delay of the preventive maintenance action.