Preventive Maintenance of a Two-Unit Priority Standby System with Repair

TL;DR

This paper analyzes optimal preventive maintenance policies for a two-unit priority standby system with repair, deriving conditions for maintenance effectiveness and explicit expressions for optimal timing based on hazard rates.

Contribution

It provides necessary and sufficient conditions for maintenance to improve system reliability and explicit formulas for optimal maintenance times considering hazard rate shapes.

Findings

Maintenance can significantly increase mean time to failure under certain hazard rate conditions.

Explicit formulas for optimal maintenance times are derived based on hazard rate and residual life.

Stochastic ordering compares system lifetimes and maintenance thresholds effectively.

Abstract

Optimal maintenance policies play an important role in the reliability analysis of repairable systems. In this paper, we study a two-unit priority standby system with a repair facility subject to preventive maintenance. In the general case, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which maintenance improves the mean time to system failure. When the hazard rate of the priority unit exhibits either a bathtub-shaped or an upside-down bathtub-shaped, we establish conditions for the existence of both a threshold time beyond which maintenance enhances the mean time to system failure and an optimal maintenance time. We also derive explicit expressions for these quantities in terms of the hazard rate and the mean residual life function. Furthermore, stochastic ordering techniques are used to compare the mean lifetimes of two independent systems under this model, as well as their threshold times and optimal maintenance times.