Risk based opportunistic maintenance model for complex mechanical systems

•Maintenance are critical for reducing costs of complex mechanical systems.•A risk based opportunistic maintenance model considering failure risk is proposed.•The global optimization algorithm is further developed to realize RBOM policy.•The influence of different parameters in the RBOM model is fully analyzed.•The developed methods can bring immediate benefits to the energy industry. The essence of the complex mechanical system can be considered as an open system. There exist coupling relationships between various parts in the system and also between different fault modes, which result in multiple fault propagation paths. Considering the safety, benefits and maintenance loss, parameters such as downtime losses, minimal repair costs, corrective, preventive and opportunistic maintenance costs, should be analyzed comprehensively to investigate the influence of different maintenance strategies. A new risk based opportunistic maintenance (RBOM) model considering failure risk is proposed in the paper. It helps to convert the negative random factors caused by single faults to a favorable opportunity of preventive defense against failure for other slight degraded components in advance, so the overall economic losses could be reduced. The global optimization algorithm is further developed to realize RBOM policy. Case studies are provided to illustrate the proposed approaches, with sensitivity analysis of the position, time, style and criterion of the RBOM strategy. Comparative study with the widely used maintenance policy demonstrates the advantage of the proposed method can significantly reduce the maintenance cost and failure risk, and are expected to bring immediate benefits to the energy industry.