Optimization of the joint selective maintenance and repairperson assignment problem under imperfect maintenance

This paper addresses the maintenance optimization problem in a multi-component system, carrying out several missions interspersed with scheduled finite breaks. Due to limited time, budget, or resources, maintenance actions can be only carried out on a limited set of components. The decision maker then has to decide which components to maintain to ensure a pre-specified performance level during the next mission. This is known as the selective maintenance problem. Most of the existing models in the literature usually assume that only one repair channel is available or that the assignment optimization can be done at a subsequent stage. To overcome this restrictive assumption, this paper introduces a novel integrated non-linear programming formulation of the selective maintenance problem to jointly select the components to be maintained, the maintenance levels to be carried out and the assignment of the maintenance tasks to multiple repairpersons or repair-channels. The fundamental constructs and the relevant parameters of this non-linear optimization problem are developed and discussed. Numerical experiments show the benefits of jointly selecting the components to be maintained and assigning the repair tasks to repairpersons.