Age replacement of components during IFR delay time

This paper proposes two alternative policies for preventive replacement of a component, which shows sign of occurrence of a fault, and operates for some random time with degraded performance, before its final failure. The time between fault occurrence and component failure is termed as delay time. The first policy, namely age replacement during delay time policy (ARDTP), recommends replacement of a faulty component on failure or preventive replacement of the same after a fixed time during its delay time. It considers the performance degradation during delay time to develop an age replacement policy. It is also shown that the policy is a feasible proposition for a component that has positive (nonnegative) performance degradation during its CFR (IFR) delay time. The second policy, OARDTP, extends ARDTP to opportunistic age replacement policy where a faulty component is replaced at the first available randomly occurring maintenance opportunity, after a fixed time from occurrence of fault, or on failure. The time between opportunities (TBO) is considered to be exponentially distributed. This policy reduces the number of forced shutdowns, which is essential to ARDTP. It is shown that the second policy is superior to the first policy if the cost of a preventive replacement with forced shutdown is more than the preventive replacement cost during an opportunity. The policies are appropriate for complex process plants, where the tracking of the entire service life of each component is difficult. Their implementation requires tracking of components' delay time only, and estimation of mean time to occurrence of faults. The policies are relatively insensitive to estimation error in failure replacement cost. As their implementation requires immediate capturing of fault occurrence information, they are particularly attractive to organizations where operators are involved in the maintenance of machines.