Preventive maintenance models for complex systems

Preventive maintenance (PM) of repairable systems can be very beneficial in reducing repair and replacement costs, and in improving system availability, by reducing the need for corrective maintenance (CM). Strategies for scheduling PM are often based on intuition and experience, though considerable improvements in performance can be achieved by fitting mathematical models to observed data; see Handlarski (1980), Dagpunar and Jack (1993) and Percy and Kobbacy (2000) for example