Designing preventive maintenance for multi-state systems with performance sharing

This paper constructs a reliability model for the performance sharing system with random shocks, and studies the optimal preventive maintenance policy for this model. Such a system contains a common bus and n components that have individual functional capacity to satisfy its demand. The common bus connects all components and is used to share surplus capacity to components whose demand cannot be satisfied by itself. Each component has several health states that are affected by random shocks and maintenance actions. Preventive maintenance and minimal repairs after failures are considered in this paper. Each health state exhibits several performance levels that depend on external influencers, such as the wind speed for wind energy power plants. The method combining the Markov process and the universal generating function technique is applied to evaluate system availability. An optimization model is established to determine the optimal preventive maintenance interval. A regional power distribution system is analyzed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed availability model and the effectiveness of the proposed method.