A General Approach for the Coordination of Maintenance Frequencies

A maintenance activity carried out on a technical system often involves a system-dependent set-up cost that is the same for all maintenance activities carried out on that system. Grouping activities thus saves costs since execution of a group of activities requires only one set-up. By now, there are several multi-component maintenance models available in the literature, but most of them suffer from intractability when the number of components grows, unless a special structure is assumed. An approach that can handle many components was introduced in the literature by Goyal et al. However, this approach requires a specific deterioration structure for components. Moreover, the authors present an algorithm that is not optimal and there is no information of how good the obtained solutions are. In this paper we present an approach that solves the model of Goyal et al. to optimality. Furthermore, we extend the approach to deal with more general maintenance models like minimal repair and inspection that can be solved to optimality as well. Even block replacement can be incorporated, in which case our approach is a good heuristic.