Optimal Maintenance Policy for a Partially Observable Two-Unit System

In this paper, we present a maintenance model of a
two-unit series system with economic dependence. Unit#1 which is
considered to be more expensive and more important, is subject to
condition monitoring (CM) at equidistant, discrete time epochs and
unit#2, which is not subject to CM has a general lifetime distribution.
The multivariate observation vectors obtained through condition
monitoring carry partial information about the hidden state of unit#1,
which can be in a healthy or a warning state while operating. Only the
failure state is assumed to be observable for both units. The objective
is to find an optimal opportunistic maintenance policy minimizing
the long-run expected average cost per unit time. The problem
is formulated and solved in the partially observable semi-Markov
decision process framework. An effective computational algorithm
for finding the optimal policy and the minimum average cost is
developed, illustrated by a numerical example.

• Leila Jafari
• Viliam Makis
• Akram Khaleghei G.B.

• Condition-Based Maintenance
• Semi-Markov Decision Process
• Multivariate Bayesian Control Chart
• Partially Observable System
• Two-unit System.

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