An approximate hybrid approach to maintenance optimisation for a system with multistate components

The maintenance optimisation of a system with multistate components is a research topic with practical significance. When the dependence among the components is considered, the state of the system becomes the combinations of the states of components. The commonly used Markovian analysis is then not practical for the large system state space. This paper developed an approximate approach to perform the steady-state analysis of the system. The developed method is combined with the simulation-based method to optimise the maintenance strategy of a system with multistate components. The numerical study shows that the steady-state analysis results of the developed approximate method are close to that of the simulation-based method, though the approximate method is much more efficient than the simulation-based method. More importantly, the errors introduced by the approximate approach decrease with the number of components in the system. The numerical study also shows that the hybrid method of maintenance optimisation can find a balance between the efficiency and accuracy. © 2016, The Society for Reliability Engineering, Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM), India and The Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden.