Condition-Based Maintenance Strategy for Production Systems Generating Environmental Damage

We consider production systems which generate damage to environment as they get older and degrade. The system is submitted to inspections to assess the generated environmental damage. The inspections can be periodic or nonperiodic. In case an inspection reveals that the environmental degradation level has exceeded the critical level , the system is considered in an advanced deterioration state and will have generated significant environmental damage. A corrective maintenance action is then performed to renew the system and clean the environment and a penalty has to be paid. In order to prevent such an undesirable situation, a lower threshold level is considered to trigger a preventive maintenance action to bring back the system to a state as good as new at a lower cost and without paying the penalty. Two inspection policies are considered (periodic and nonperiodic). For each one of them, a mathematical model and a numerical procedure are developed to determine simultaneously the preventive maintenance (PM) threshold and the inspection sequence which minimize the average long-run cost per time unit. Numerical calculations are performed to illustrate the proposed maintenance policies and highlight their main characteristics with respect to relevant input parameters.