A new integrated strategy for optimising the maintenance cost of complex systems using reliability importance measures

With the aging of production systems, failure modes become more common resulting in additional maintenance costs. To reduce these costs excess, flexible and smart maintenance strategies should be considered. This article proposes an integrated condition-based maintenance method associating opportunistic and importance measure concepts (IMC). The objective of an IMC-based model is to determine the contribution of the system’s components according to their criticality degree for reliability improvement and maintenance planning. The identification of the best maintenance planning consists of determining the expected minimal cost that guarantees the repair actions of a group of critical components in one shot. Therefore, determining IMC values is not so easy for complex systems, it requires knowing their operational structure, the determination of the reliability value of each configuration and finally calculating each component's IMC degree and ranking them for the prioritisation selection. For testing the proposed method, an industrial case study has been used, regarding a complex system whose components fail at random times. The system undergoes minimal repairs if one or more components fail accidentally or by decision after inspection actions. The numerical results show that the developed approach incurs minimal maintenance costs, and can be integrated as a decision-aid solution for manufacturers.