A MAINTENANCE MODEL FOR COMPONENTS EXPOSED TO SEVERAL FAILURE MECHANISMS AND IMPERFECT REPAIR
Helge Langseth, Bo Henry Lindqvist · Series on quality, reliability and engineering statistics · 2003
In this chapter we employ a model for components which fail due to one of a series of "competing" failure mechanisms, each acting independently on the system. The components under consideration are repaired upon failure, but are also preventively maintained. The preventive maintenance (PM) is performed periodically with some fixed period # , but PM can also be performed out of schedule due to casual observation of an evolving failure. The maintenance need not be perfect; we use a modified version of the imperfect repair model by Brown and Proschan to allow a flexible yet simple maintenance model. Our motivation for this model is to estimate quantities which describe the "goodness" of the maintenance crew; their ability to prevent failures by performing thorough maintenance at the correct time. The data required to estimate the parameters in the model we propose are the intermediate failure times, the "winning" failure mechanism associated with each failure (i.e. the fa