Reliability evaluation for a multi-state system subject to imperfect repair and maintenance

Effective maintenance management is essential to
reduce the adverse effect of equipment failure to operation.
This is accomplished by accurately predicting the equipment
failure such that appropriate actions can be planned and
taken in order to minimize the impact of equipment failure
to operation. This paper presents a development of model
based on Markov process for a degraded multi-state system
to evaluate the system performance. The system
degradation was quantified by five distinct level of system’s production output ranging from perfect functioning state to complete failure with zero output. At any point in time, the system can experience Poisson failure from any state upon which an imperfect repair will be performed while imperfect preventive maintenance will be performed at the last acceptable state as indicated by minimum acceptable
production output. This research explored a method of
estimating of transition matrix for the five state Markov
process by utilizing production output data. The results
indicate the applicability of Markov where comparison with
traditionally binary model is presented.