Title: Opportunistic maintenance on the automatic switching mechanism of a two-unit multi-state system

Authors: Vasilis P. Koutras; Sonia Malefaki; Agapios N. Platis

Addresses: Department of Financial and Management Engineering, University of the Aegean, GR 82100 Chios, Greece ' Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics, University of Patras, GR 26500 Rio Patras, Greece ' Department of Financial and Management Engineering, University of the Aegean, GR 82100 Chios, Greece

Abstract: A two-unit multi-state deteriorating system consisting of one operating and one unit in standby mode, under preventive maintenance and imperfect switch is considered. System control is switched to the standby unit upon operating unit failure or maintenance, either automatically, by an automatic switching mechanism (ASM), or manually. To avoid ASM failures, triggering an opportunistic maintenance (OM) on the automatic switching mechanism is proposed upon unit maintenance. The main objective is to evaluate the effect of ASM opportunistic maintenance on system's dependability and performance. The asymptotic availability and the total expected operational cost of the system with and without automatic switching mechanism OM for various unit maintenance policies are compared through a numerical example. The results are encouraging since the proposed model with OM provides higher availability and significantly reduced operational cost regardless the adopted maintenance policy. [Received: 29 January 2020; Accepted: 28 September 2020]

Keywords: opportunistic maintenance; multi-state deteriorating system; imperfect switch; redundancy; asymptotic availability; total expected operational cost.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIE.2021.117319

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2021 Vol.15 No.5, pp.616 - 642

Received: 29 Jan 2020
Accepted: 28 Sep 2020
Published online: 31 Aug 2021 *

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