Cannibalization policies: adoption in the maintenance of fleet systems

Fleet systems are considered complex due to the interaction between their units and components. Maintenance management systems face various challenges to achieve acceptable availability and reliability rates at a reasonable cost. A critical task for making maintenance decisions is understanding the system requirements to select maintenance policies appropriate for the actual and future system state. When there is a replacement shortage in a fleet system, and it is impossible to supply new spare parts quickly, cannibalization policies can mitigate this scarcity via the interchange of components. However, this procedure presents the maintenance manager with different evaluation effects, such as increased maintenance hours, decreased system reliability rate, and unavailability in some units. Finding an equilibrium between the benefits and risks has caught the attention of researchers. This work gathers diverse proposals for applying cannibalization policies and the effects that arise from using them. Models, methods, tools, and identified gaps in understanding what parameters of the components and environments of the fleet systems favor cannibalization are discussed.