COMPARISON BETWEEN CONDITION-BASED, AGE-BASED AND FAILURE-BASED MAINTENANCE POLICIES IN PARALLEL AND SERIES CONFIGURATIONS: A SIMULATION ANALYSIS

This paper investigates the performance of condition-based maintenance (CBM), age-based maintenance (ABM) and failure-based maintenance (FBM) policies in series and parallel multi-resource systems. Condition-based maintenance is mainly taken into account as a significant maintenance policy that makes use of the component operating circumstances to predict failure occurrence. The advantage of implementing CBM is that the component is preventively maintained only when necessary and as a result, the entity can benefit saving resources and system availability. Since implementing CBM seems to be impossible in some situations, ABM and FBM are considered as two alternatives for CBM. In this paper, these three policies are compared with each other using simulation. To evaluate and analyze these three maintenance policies in parallel and series configurations, three performance indicators including efficiency (E), total maintenance costs (TMC) and average queue (AQ) are introduced for all scenarios. An explanatory case study is applied to investigate the performance of these policies in various conditions. The results demonstrate that in general, CBM performs better than ABM, and on the other hand, ABM shows better results in comparison to FBM. This is the first study which compares CBM, ABM and FBM policies in series and parallel configurations considering efficiency, maintenance cost and queue length as criteria.