Performance reliability of high-maintenance systems

✍ Scribed by R. Narasimha

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1977
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 850 KB
• Volume: 303
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0016-0032
• DOI: 10.1016/0016-0032(77)90072-2

✦ Synopsis

The time-history of the performance of a system is treated as a stochastic corrective process, in which deterioration due to aging is counteracted at brief maintenance checks. Using a difision approximation for the deterioration, simple models are proposed for describing maintenance either by component replacement or by performance restoration. Equilibrium solutions of the models show that the performance has a probability distribution with exponential tails: the uncritical use of Gaussians can grossly underestimate the probability of poor performance. The proposed models are supported by recent observational evidence on aircraft track-keeping errors, which are shown to follow the modified exponential distribution derived here. The analysis also brings out the relation between the deterioration characteristics of the system and the intensity of

the maintenance effort required to achieve a given performance reliability. Performance Reliability of High-Maintenance Systems IV.2. Variable replacement performance