PROBABILISTIC EVALUATION OF THE EFFECT OF MAINTENANCE ON RELIABILITY - AN APPLICATION

The purpose of maintenance is to extend equipment lifetime, or at leas t the mean time to the next failure. While too little maintenance may have very costly consequences, maintenance, too, incurs expenditures a nd it may not be economical to perform it too frequently. Therefore, t he two costs must be balanced. In the past, attempts to approximate th is balance have often been based on trial and error. In this paper, a probabilistic model is proposed for the purpose, and a program based o n this model is described. The model provides a quantitative connectio n between reliability and maintenance, a link missing in the heuristic approaches. The component ageing process is modelled, and the mean an d distribution of the remaining life to failure are predicted for any stage of ageing. The method is applied to a practical example.