Multi-State Selective Maintenance Decisions

摘要

All military organizations depend on the reliable performance of repairable systems for the successful completion of missions. Due to limitations in maintenance resources, a maintenance manager must decide how to allocate available resources. This allocation falls within the domain of selective maintenance. Selective maintenance is defined as the process of identifying the subset of maintenance activities to perform from a set of desired maintenance actions. Previously, researchers developed a class of mathematical models that can be used to identify selective maintenance decisions for the following scenario. A system has just completed a mission and will begin its next mission soon. Maintenance cannot be performed during missions; therefore, the decision-maker must decide which components to maintain prior to the next mission. The selective maintenance models considered to date treat decision-making for binary-state systems (i.e. all components, subsystems, and the system itself are assumed to be either functioning or failed at any point in time). The primary objective of this project is to develop a modeling-based methodology for managing selective maintenance decisions when multiple (more than two) system states are possible. The activities required to achieve the objective of this project are applied to a set of systems utilized by the U.S. Air Force. First, the research literature for selective maintenance and multi-state analysis is presented. Then, the authors define a scenario in which systems in various states of maintenance need must perform a number of different missions. For this scenario, they formulate a non-linear mathematical program, and then explore three solution procedures for the optimization problem.