Economic life prediction of repairable multi-component systems based on extension theory

Economic affordability is a crucial factor for repairable systems. Previous work about economic life prediction of systems mainly concerned about cost models, regardless of system structure or components' relationship. In this paper, a new economic life prediction method has been proposed with combination of a maintenance model and an accumulative damage model. The maintenance model is to depict the repairable deteriorating components of system. Non-repairable components' degradation processes are described by the accumulative damage model. Each component failure threshold can be obtained by allocating system failure threshold based on the extensive theory. Then, the objective of minimizing total cost determines the economic life value of system. Finally, a pump example is presented to illustrate the procedures.