Age Replacement for Balanced Systems Under Mission Durations

With advances in technology, systems such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and planetary landing vehicles whose operation requires maintaining balance across sectors have attracted increasing attention within the balanced systems literature. For such applications, explicitly incorporating mission duration into maintenance and reliability analyses is crucial, since failure to complete a mission uninterrupted may lead to severe operational and economic losses. In this study, mission duration aware age replacement policies are investigated for ‐out‐of‐ balanced systems with sectors by jointly considering the synchronized operating mechanism of the system and the mission duration constraint. Accordingly, the simple replacement, replacement first, and replacement last policies are formulated for the balanced structure and compared through numerical analyses by identifying the optimal system size and the planned replacement time. Finally, the applicability of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a case study on a multilevel UAV engine system.