Control-limit Policy of Condition-based Maintenance Optimization for Multi-component System by Means of Monte Carlo Simulation

Condition-based Maintenance (CBM) is an effective maintenance policy to improve the reliability of industry assets. One of the fast growing research topics is about the threshold-type CBM policy. For the criterion of cost, the optimal threshold can determine whether or not the condition-based preventive maintenance action should be performed according to the current condition. For multi-component system, the cost evaluation based on numerical algorithm will suffer time-consuming computations if the number of components increases. For cost evaluation for the proportional hazards model based CBM policy, an algorithm based on Monte Carlo simulation is developed to balance the amount of calculations and the accuracy of the optimal thresholds. A comparative case study is presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for cost evaluation.