Abstract
Abstract| Preventive maintenance is applied to improve the system availability or decrease the operational cost. In this paper the preventive maintenance with generally distributed parameters are discussed, and the steady-state solution is obtained by solving the underlying semi-Markov process (SMP). Specially, periodic preventive maintenance with deterministically distributed repair time and maintenance time is discussed in detail, and closed-form results are presented. The behavior of the preventive maintenance mechanism is evaluated by numerical examples. Using our results, system operational cost can be reduced by the proper choice of optimal maintenance intervals.