AN OPTIMAL INSPECTION AND MAINTENANCE POLICY OF A DETERIORATING SYSTEM

This paper treats an optimal inspection and maintenance policy of a continuous time Markovian deteriorating system, which minimizes the total discount,~d expected time in which the system is not operating. The problem is formulated by a semi·Markov decision process and some properties of an optimal policy are obtained, that is, a control limit rule holds and as the system degrades, an optimal inspection time interval becomes shorter. For a discrete time Markovian deterioration case, almost the same discussion is made.