A critical review of selective maintenance for mission-oriented systems: challenges and a roadmap for novel contributions

The selective maintenance problem (SMP) arises in many mission-oriented multi-component systems that are operated for consecutive missions interspersed with finite breaks, during which only limited component repairs can be performed due to constrained resources. This NP-hard problem decides which components to maintain and to what levels of repair to guarantee a pre-specified performance level during the subsequent mission. Over the last two decades, a sizeable body of literature has been published on this topic. However, the contributions have stagnated in quality, and most articles deal with small to moderate problems. This paper provides a critical review of the SMP literature. A total of 136 research articles related to SMP are reviewed and a selection of key representative models is discussed in detail. This review is framed according to two feature categories: formulation characteristics, composed of three sub-groups of characteristics related to the system, maintenance and mathematical model characteristics; and solution approaches, grouped by exact methods and approximate algorithms. This critical review is aimed at identifying drawbacks, shortcomings, and blind spots of the SMP literature, and providing a roadmap for the challenges to be addressed and innovative future research topics to further advance the academic and industrial contributions of SMP.