Determining Optimal Inspection Intervals in Maintenance Considering Equipment Aging Failures

摘要

This paper presents an integrated inspection and failure model of equipment for asset management. The model combines both repairable and aging failure modes with maintenance activities. Based on this model, an optimization approach for determining equipment inspection interval is proposed. The proposed approach can optimize the inspection interval by minimizing the total cost including maintenance, failure loss, repair, replacement, and patrol costs. The proposed method is applied to a mixed set of equipment consisting of breakers and transformers in two regions. The results indicate that the optimal inspection interval for each region can be effectively obtained using the proposed method. Equipment aging failures have significant impacts on the optimal inspection interval. The optimal inspection interval gradually becomes shorter over years due to the equipment aging process. The optimal inspection interval is different for different regions depending on the equipment aging status and other factors in each region. Therefore, it is recommended to have a region-specific inspection strategy for each area.