Decision support in a condition based environment

This paper presents an approach for short‐term maintenance planning, based on information about the technical health of an item. A simple cost/risk model is used to calculate the expected costs when postponing preventive maintenance for an item that is soon to fail, based on the cost of corrective and preventive maintenance and the probability of failure. The probability of failure is calculated on the basis of an underlying probability density function f(t), which is determined from available quantitative and qualitative information. The preventive maintenance cost is time dependent, and can be described either as a general cost function or as a specific cost function. The specific cost function can be derived from stochastic shifts in the maintenance cost for the actual problem at hand.