IMPROVING SYSTEM AVAILABILITY THROUGH OPPORTUNISTIC MAINTENANCE

Abstract

Most modern systems are equipped with complex, expensive and high technology components whose maintenance costs have become an increasingly large portion of the total operating cost of these systems. Therefore, some efforts are required to reduce this cost and opportunistic maintenance is an alternate available to overcome this problem. This project deals with opportunistic maintenance modeling for availability analysis of repairable mechanical systems using Markovian approaches. The conventional techniques such as reliability block diagram, fault tree analysis and reliability graphs are of no use when there comes repairs and other dependencies. The Markovian approaches considered for modeling as it can incorporate repair and other dependency features in the model. In this work availability models are developed for a multi stage reciprocating air compressor system to see the gain due to opportunistic maintenance. Stochastic modelling and analysis are carried out using Markovian and Semi-Markovian approaches. The system availability is evaluated considering different types of repair actions, namely, perfect repair and imperfect repair.