A general modeling method for opportunistic maintenance modeling of multi-unit systems

This paper presents a deterioration state space partition method for opportunistic maintenance modeling of multi-unit systems. The method represents common characteristics of opportunistic maintenance models based on different maintenance strategies. All possible maintenance groups of general multi-unit systems with a known number of non-identical units at each maintenance decision time and their corresponding probabilities are deduced using the presented approach. Further, a general representation of the stationary law of the system deterioration and its numerical solution is developed. Numerical experiments verify the correctness and validity of the state space partition method and the numerical solution of the stationary probability density. The proposed method is applicable to both single-unit and multi-unit systems, and it provides a new generalized modeling method for maintenance optimization of multi-unit systems.