Joint optimization of preventive maintenance and inventory management for standby systems with hybrid-deteriorating spare parts

Abstract As an effective way to enhance the system reliability, the standby redundancy technique has been widely applied in many industrial systems. Finding methods to determine the maintenance policy and spare-part inventory management is an interesting practical issue. However, due to the imperfect storage and inner mechanism, the spare parts usually deteriorate over time, which not only degrades their performance but also may lead to storage failure. In addition, the immediate burst failure caused by the external shock should not be neglected in storage. These two aspects make the joint optimization of preventive maintenance and inventory policies for a standby system more challenging. Thus, in this study, we first propose a general iterative approach for the lifetime estimation of standby systems with a hybrid spare-part degradation process, which includes both stochastic degradation and immediate burst failure. We then take an example of the Wiener-process-based model to explain how to obtain the analytical results of the lifetime estimation. On this basis, we further establish a joint optimization model, in which the preventive block replacement interval and the inventory number are treated as two decision variables to minimize the expected cost per unit time. Finally, a numerical example and practical case are provided for illustration.