Maintenance Modeling and Policies

The systems used in production, transportation services, and communication services constitute the majority part of not only industrial activities but also our daily life. Most of them have many units or components with various structure that will degrade with time or usage, and even suffer from a sudden failure due to the random shocks. For some systems, such as military systems, aircrafts, and nuclear power plants, they are of great importance and cannot afford to any failure. A machine in industrial plant failing to work properly will interpret the whole production assembly line and cost a large amount of capital and labor, while the failure of the aircraft will endanger the life of all the passengers. Therefore, maintenance on these systems is necessary due to the two aspects: (1) prolong the service life of the products; (2) improve the system reliability to avoid unnecessary failure.