Adaptive sequential preventive maintenance policy and Bayesian consideration

This article proposes an adaptive sequential preventive maintenance (PM) policy for which an improvement factor is newly introduced to measure the PM effect at each PM. For this model, the PM actions are conducted at different time intervals so that an adaptive method needs to be utilized to determine the optimal PM times minimizing the expected cost rate per unit time. At each PM, the hazard rate is reduced by an amount affected by the improvement factor which depends on the number of PM's preceding the current one. We derive mathematical formulas to evaluate the expected cost rate per unit time by incorporating the PM cost, repair cost, and replacement cost. Assuming that the failure times follow a Weibull distribution, we propose an optimal sequential PM policy by minimizing the expected cost rate. Furthermore, we consider Bayesian aspects for the sequential PM policy to discuss its optimality. The effect of some parameters and the functional forms of improvement factor on the optimal PM policy is measured numerically by sensibility analysis and some numerical examples are presented for illustrative purposes.