Assessment of Dynamic Maintenance Management

Today's technological systems are expected to perform at very high standards throughout their operational phase. The cost associated with unavailability of these systems is very high and especially with the defense systems or medical equipment which can directly affect human lives. The maintenance system plays an important role in achieving higher performance targets. In order to manage maintenance activities in more informed and rational manner, it is very important to understand the inherently complex and dynamic structure of the system. Traditionally maintenance policies are derived from reliability characteristics of individual components or sub-systems. This research makes an attempt to understand the system from the forest level and suggest better maintenance policies for achieving higher availability and lower system degradation. The leverage is gained from System Dynamics framework's ability to model complex systems and capture various feedback loops. The simulation results reveal that with the limited preventive maintenance capacity and within the given assumptions of the model, there exists and optimal preventive maintenance interval which is not the minimum. The simulation results also reflect that frequent preventive maintenance is required at higher load factors.