Effectiveness evaluation of maintenance strategies for cyclical systems

A method is proposed to formulate criteria for effectiveness evaluation of batch system maintenance strategies. The operation is regarded as a random state changing process during the running and idle time and as a deterministic process during the maintenance. The system states are described in terms of presence or absence of flagrant failures and the composition of latent faults. Maintenance options which differ in the list of control variables and the amount of hardware to be restored (repaired) are specified as matrices of system states. The maintenance strategy is dictated by a sequence of such matrices for the operation process.