A new integrated strategy for optimizing the maintenance cost of Production systems using reliability importance measures

This paper presents an opportunistic condition-based maintenance strategy for multi-component systems. This strategy allows the selection of systems’ components to be replaced or to undergo maintenance repairs based on the effect of importance measure concepts (IMC). IMC models proceeds by determining the contribution of each component in terms of success or failure degrees respecting two factors: (1) the probability of components to remain in operations under various conditions, and (2) the location of such components in the system structure. However, evaluating IMC factors is not so easy for complex systems; it requires knowing their operational structure, their reliability, and the calculation of the IMC degree and ranking them for the selection. Then, the IMC results are integrated into an opportunistic maintenance strategy to constitute a maintenance system's framework. In addition, a multicomponent system composed of 14 nodes and 23 links is provided to illustrate the proposed maintenance strategy that incurs a maximum of cost saving and to reduce spare parts unnecessarily usage.