Reliability Engineering and Services

7Performance‐Based Maintenance

7.1 Introduction

Maintenance, repair, and overhaul plays an important role in sustaining the operation of engineering systems in the private and public sectors. These systems usually possess the following features: capital intensive, long service life, high downtime cost, and mission‐critical. The goal of maintenance is to proactively replace aging components to ensure high system reliability and availability with minimum cost. In Sections 7.2–7.6, we introduce three maintenance strategies: corrective maintenance (CM), usage‐based preventive maintenance (PM), and condition‐based maintenance (CBM). Their operational principle and the way to determine the optimal replacement time is discussed. For CBM, we focus on the gamma process, inverse‐Gaussian process, and non‐stationary Gaussian process (NSGP) models. In Section 7.7, we introduce the performance‐based maintenance (PBM) concept in which the maintenance cost is minimized based on the system availability and the payment scheme, not on the materials, labor, or time transacted. A unified system availability model incorporating various performance drivers is derived under uncertain usage. In Section 7.8, we develop a principal‐agent game model for the design and planning of PBM contracts. Challenges arising from the actual implementation are discussed, such as adverse selection, moral hazard, and information asymmetry. The chapter concludes with a case study in which NSGP is employed to predict the ...