An adaptive reliability-based maintenance policy for mechanical systems under variable environments

The performance of mechanical systems is greatly influenced by varying operational environments such as load, temperature, and humidity, which can result in accelerated degradation and failure. To address this issue, this article considers an adaptive maintenance policy based on updated conditional reliability for mechanical systems under variable environments. A model of deterioration-integrated failure process is presented, which integrates degradation process, failure events, and environmental variables of the system. The degradation process is modeled by a random effect Wiener process, with its drift parameter following a general distribution to represent the environmental random effects. The failure events are modeled by a proportional hazards (PH) model with environment-varying covariate. The health of the system is evaluated using a matrix-based approximation method that provides estimates of the system's conditional reliability and mean residual life. Using the prognostic information, an adaptive maintenance model with a switchable control chart is then developed to monitor and maintain system based on the status of system reliability. The decision variables of the adaptive reliability-based maintenance are determined by a computational algorithm formulated in a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) framework, with the objective of minimizing the long-run expected average cost per unit time. Vibrational data of bearings under varying operational environments are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.