Title: A multi-state degraded system with inspection and maintainability

Authors: Madhu Jain; Preeti Naresh

Addresses: Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee 247 667, Uttarakhand, India. ' School of Basic and Applied Sciences, Shobhit University, Meerut 250 001, Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract: Due to continuous use, the degradation may occur in the system and it may cause the decrement in its performance. A multi-state degraded system incorporating the concepts of inspection, corrective and preventive maintenance (PM) has been investigated in this paper. The degraded stages of the model are considered as discrete state process out of which first stage is fully working stage and the last stage is failed stage. The PM policy is used according to which after reaching at the last acceptable degraded stage, the system can be brought back to the higher efficiency state. The system is subjected to random inspection at different degraded states. When the system fails, it can be restored by the use of corrective maintenance (CM). To compute the transient and steady-state probabilities of the system, Laplace transformation and recursive technique are used. Various performance measures such as production rate, availability, mean time between inspections, mean time between PM, mean time between CM, etc. are obtained using state probabilities. A numerical illustration has been facilitated to explore the effects of parameters on the system performance descriptors.

Keywords: multi-state degraded systems; preventive maintenance; corrective maintenance; random inspection; degradation; availability; system performance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2012.048859

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2012 Vol.12 No.2, pp.165 - 187

Published online: 20 Dec 2014 *

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