Optimal age replacement policy for parallel and series systems with dependent components
Abstract
Maintenance plays a very vital role throughout the lifetime of a system and also in reality, the lifetime of components of a system may be dependent on each other that should be considered in a maintenance policy. This paper deals with age replacement policy for repairable series and parallel systems with n dependent components. We present two optimal age replacement policies based on the minimum expected cost function and maximum availability function. In this work, the copula framework is used to model the dependence structure for components and formulate the optimal decision problems. Therefore managers can use the results to decrease the cost imposed or increase the availability of their series or parallel systems with dependent components. The effects of the parameters of the model on the optimal solutions are studied and also the comparison of copulas is presented. An application on offshore wind turbine systems as a case study is discussed.