Evaluation of a maintenance strategy by the analysis of the rate of repair

Abstract

Abstract The evaluation of maintenance strategies is a problem which has been widely tackled. However, it remains a topic worthy of consideration since the economic stakes peculiar to this activity are huge. The work presented in this paper deals with this problem under the point of view of data feedback. A statistical analysis is made from the examination of the forms of the failure rate distribution. The laws resulting from the implementation of a given maintenance strategy inform us about the relevance of the choices representative of this strategy. The construction of these laws from a raw time of repair is a global approach which tends to hide the induced phenomenon. A decomposition of the repair process into phases allows us to better identify the influence of the strategy parameters. The analysis of each elementary phase distribution is interesting since it givesinformation about the performance of the implemented maintenance strategy. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.