Maintenance Decision-Making Under the Cost Criterion and the Competing Risks Approach

The definition of an appropriated maintenance policy appears essential to avoid the system failures and ensure its optimal operation, while taking into account the criteria of availability and costs. This article deals with a maintenance decision-making for a system subject to two competing maintenance actions, corrective and preventive maintenance. To define this situation of dependent competing risks, the Alert Delay model seems well suited because it involves the notion of a delivered alert before system failure in order to perform preventive maintenance. This paper proposes an approach including both an extension of the Alert Delay model where the considered system follows an exponential distribution, and the total maintenance cost assessment of the system. These two concepts provide an aid decision-making to select the optimal maintenance policy based on the minimal cost. The proposed approach is validated in a computer system localized in a real industrial enterprise.