A condition-based maintenance policy for multi-component systems with Lévy copulas dependence

• A new adaptive maintenance policy for grouping maintenance actions is proposed.
• The impacts of both economic and stochastic dependences are investigated.
• The performance of the proposed maintenance policy is evaluated under different system configurations.
• The stochastic dependence is modelled by Lévy copulas.
• The proposed maintenance decision rule can take full advantage of economic and stochastic dependences.

In this paper, we propose a new condition-based maintenance policy for multi-component systems taking into account stochastic and economic dependences. The stochastic dependence between components due to common environment is modelled by Lévy copulas. Its influence on the maintenance optimization is investigated with different dependence degrees. On the issue of economic dependence providing opportunities to group maintenance activities, a new maintenance decision rule is proposed which permits maintenance grouping. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed maintenance policy, we compare it to the classical maintenance policies.