There are many repair/replacement problems have been investigated during the pastdecades. A repairable system is usually subject to stochastic failure when it deteriorates with age. The overall objective of this research is to investigate the optimal maintenance policy by modeling the system deteriorating process as a Markov decision process. The optimal repair/replacement policy is proposed with incorporating the costs of operating cost, general repair, failure replacement and preventive replacement under the discounted cost criterion. The specific maintenance actions for a repairable system are whether to replace the system, to perform a general repair or to keep it operating. This paper is an extension of the model developed by Chen and Feldman (1997) in which an optimal policy is investigated. The major modifications of the standard replacement model in this research are the addition of the general repair with age reduction factor and the number of general repairs can be used more than once. Finally, the optimal parameters of the maintenance policy can be obtained by solving the n-stage problem from the backward recursive scheme over a set of finite horizons to approximate the optimal policy for the infinite planning horizons.
展开▼
