Quality driven maintenance policies for a system subject to random deterioration and hidden failures

The price for survival in the global markets is increasing every year with rapid technology advancement and cost pressures; companies must work around the clock to meet evolving customer expectations on time. Disruption of operations is the main form of risk that exposes companies to various degrees challenges across the critical nodes of their supply-chain. This project is concerned with the production phase and seeks to improve maintenance decisions against probably the most unpredictable type of system failure: hidden failures. If uninspected, hidden failures may trigger unanticipated disruptions in production, which could result in tremendous financial losses to the company. In this project, we study the planning of one of the most effective weapons against hidden failures: periodic inspections and condition-based maintenance activities where system degradation changes depending on the environment. We will analyze various alternatives comparatively and derive the optimal policy given information on the system state and environmental degradation process. To provide valuable guidelines to practitioners, we also plan to construct simple and close-to-optimal decision rules that could be implemented in industrial maintenance planning problems. We believe the project will help establish close links between industry and academia as well and will pave the way for future collaborations with various industries in Oman including oil and gas on mitigation of real production shutdown risks.