Optimal Replacement Age and Maintenance Cost: A Case Study

摘要

Maintenance plays a very vital role throughout an equipment/system's planned life-cycle. Maintenance costs contribute a major portion of the life cycle costs of an equipment or system. This paper analyzes a set of failure data of a particular type of battery that used in automobile and/or trailer and proposes the optimal maintenance age at which the nonfailed battery be maintained. A 2-fold Weibull mixture distribution is selected as the suitable distribution for the lifetime of the battery. The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is applied to estimate the parameters of the mixture distribution. The research will be of interest for effective maintenance management to maintenance engineers and managers working in battery manufacturing industry, as well as customers and service providers.