Multi-Mission Selective Maintenance Decisions

Abstract : The primary objective of this research was to develop a modeling-based methodology for managing selective maintenance decisions when the planning horizon is more than one future mission. First, the research literature for selective maintenance is presented. The selective maintenance literature is limited in that current models only consider a single, future mission. Next, background research is presented in which the selective maintenance model treating decision-making relative to a single, future mission is defined. This model serves as the foundation for our multi-mission analysis. In this work, we define a scenario in which a system must perform a sequence of missions. The reliability characteristics of the system are defined, and we extend the single- mission scenario parameters such that decision variables for one mission are the input parameters for the next mission. An objective function that maximizes the expected number of successful missions remaining in the planning horizon is defined. Finally, we formulate a stochastic dynamic programming model to solve the multi-mission scenario and present a numerical example. This example shows that the selective maintenance decisions relative to a multi-mission scenario may differ from the decisions for a single-mission scenario.