A cost model for the selection of a maintenance activity in a series system

Real industrial systems are constituted by the interconnection of many components, some of them critical for the system reliability. Therefore, in order to avoid failures and guarantee a high system reliability, maintenance actions must be carefully planned and performed. Actually, to achieve this objective with low costs, condition based maintenance and, more recently, predictive maintenance are proposed. This paper proposes a cost model for the selection of a maintenance trip in a series system, constituted by two monitored components, taking into account a constraint on system reliability. This permits to the decision maker the optimal selection of the component(s) to be maintained by taking into account the actual degradation level of each component through signals flowing from the monitoring system