Post-servicing failure rates: Optimizing preventive maintenance interval and quantifying maintenance induced failure in repairable systems

Abstract

The underlying aims of preventive maintenance (PM) include improving reliability, operational availability and life-cycle costs of systems by reducing the risk of potentially expensive and inopportune failure. Optimizing PM frequency maximizes these benefits. Historically, this has been difficult to achieve due to the uncertainty regarding how each system will perform in a particular role, configuration and environment, inability to model maintenance induced failure (or ignorance and skepticism of the concept) and the complexity of analyzing systems with multiple preventive failure modes.