Reliability prediction for condition-based maintained systems

The paper presents a methodology based on relevant condition predictor (RCP ) for reliability prediction for systems under condition-based maintenance. By considering the event of not being able to recognise the fault initiati on or the critical state in RCP-based maintenance, the methodology uses Mar kov models for reliability prediction. The cases of single and multiple rel evant condition predictors are presented along with a numerical procedure t o obtain the reliability functions for RCP-based maintained systems. Numeri cal examples are used to illustrate the methodology and the values of relia bility are obtained at discrete time points using the numerical algorithm. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.