Minimization of the life cycle cost for a multistate system under periodic maintenance

Although preventive maintenance policies have received extensive interest, limited attention has been paid to implementing multiple maintenance actions for a multistate system over a finite horizon in continuous time. Therefore, this study closely examines such maintenance actions by viewing a coherent multicomponent system as a multistate system and assuming that the necessary maintenance action and cost which move the current state to an extremely better state depends on the current state. The above problem is also formulated as a periodic maintenance model. In addition, the model's characteristics are elucidated to obtain the optimal cycle time of maintenance actions, thereby minimizing the life cycle cost over a specific finite horizon.