Condition based maintenance optimization considering multiple objectives

In condition based maintenance (CBM) optimization, the main optimization objectives include maximizing reliability and minimizing maintenance costs, which are often times conflicting to each other. In this work, we develop a physical programming based approach to deal with the multi-objective condition based maintenance optimization problem. Physical programming presents two major advantages: (1) it is an efficient approach to capture the decision makers’ preferences on the objectives by eliminating the iterative process of adjusting the weights of the objectives, and (2) it is easy to use in that decision makers just need to specify physically meaningful boundaries for the objectives. The maintenance cost and reliability objectives are calculated based on proportional hazards model and a control limit CBM replacement policy. With the proposed approach, the decision maker can systematically and efficiently make good tradeoff between the cost objective and reliability objective. An example is used to illustrate the proposed approach.