Maintenance cost study for deteriorating systems : age-replacement policy vs. condition-based maintenance policy

This paper deals with the maintenance cost of deteriorating systems. Two maintenance strategies are studied: age-replacement and condition-based maintenance. To compare these two policies, degradation models are used: these models characterize the degradation level but also the system time-to-failure. In order to compute the optimal condition-based maintenance cost, we suppose that the main influencing sources are the preventive threshold, the inspection frequency and the inspection cost. Numerical examples illustrate the maintenance cost computation and compare the optimal costs of both policies.