Optimal Block Replacement Policies for Mission-Oriented Systems Considering the Required Availability

According to the practical situations, for the systems such as airliners and ships, the engineers pay more attention to the availability besides the reliability and maintenance cost. To address preventive replacement problems of the balance between the expected cost rate and availability, we firstly analyze properties about the availability function, expected cost rate and required availability. Then, the simple block replacement policy for mission-oriented systems considering the required availability is proposed. We analyze the optimum parameters that minimize the expected cost rate with the required availability. From the costs and maintainability, the planned replacement time is integrated into the simple block replacement, and the replacement first and last are discussed. The numerical examples are provide to verify the correctness of analytical methods. At last, the proposed policies in this paper are applied to research the maintenance of the electronic radar system of the airliner with the assumed data. It can give the effective advices for engineers to maintain the mission-oriented systems that undergo the block replacement considering the required availability