Opportunistic Maintenance for Multi-component Shock Models

This paper is concerned with opportunistic maintenance on a multi-component cumulative damage shock model with stochastically dependent components. A component fails when its cumulative damage exceeds a given threshold, and any such a failure creates a maintenance opportunity, and triggers a simultaneous repair on all the components, including the non-failed ones, such that damages accumulated at various components are reduced to certain degrees. Utilizing the coupling method, stochastic maintenance comparisons on failure occurrences under different model parameters are obtained. Some positive dependence properties of this multi-component shock model are also presented. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2006