Identification of optimal preventive maintenance decisions for composite components

This research proposes a decision support tool which identifies cost-optimal maintenance decisions for a given planning period. Simultaneously, the reliability state of the component is kept at or below a given reliability threshold: a failure limit policy applies. The tool is developed to support repair-or-replacement decision making for composite components likely to suffer impact damage. As a core part of the tool, a cost minimization problem is defined and solved using a search tree algorithm with heuristic constraints. Application to a case study which utilizes historical damage data and subsequent simulation shows the potential of the tool to identify cost-minimal maintenance decisions. The decision support tool is capable of incorporating a wide range of parameters to study preventive maintenance decision making in depth.