Condition-based maintenance strategies for stochastically dependent systems using Nested Lévy copulas

Abstract Nowadays, industrial systems are more and more complex and components are integrated dependently. Without consideration of dependence between components often leads to overestimate the reliability of system and high maintenance cost. In this paper, a multi-component system with hierarchical stochastic dependencies is considered. Components within subsystem are strongly correlated and dependence between subsystems is heterogeneous. Thanks to its capacity of modeling asymmetric dependence structures, the Nested Levy copula is used in this paper. Based on the multiple sources of dependence among components and hierarchical structures, a novel condition-based maintenance policy is proposed. The inspection scheme as well as maintenance decision is dynamically planned according to the collected inspection information and the influence of stochastic dependence is investigated. The numerical results show the efficiency and robustness of proposed maintenance policy on reducing the inspection and maintenance cost.