Component Selections for Preventive Maintenance with Cost Maintenance Priority

In reliability engineering, while failed components in a system is being repaired, preventive maintenance (PM) may be conducted on the other components to improve the reliability of the system. Several recently published papers have considered how to select components for PM under this setting, but they did not consider related costs as an important factor. This paper proposes several novel measures on component selection for PM. The relevant costs include the cost of system failure, the cost of repairing the failed component, and the PM cost. Meanwhile, according to the proposed cost-based improvement potential, this paper investigates the optimal component maintenance level. A numerical example is used as a case study to illustrate the applicability of the proposed methods.