Maintenance Optimization of k-Out-of-n Load-Sharing Systems Under Continuous Operation

Load sharing is a common mechanism in redundant systems, which possesses significant impacts on operational safety. Although failure analyses of such systems are abundant, the risk mitigation methodology through elaborate maintenance scheduling is still insufficient. To address such deficiency, we innovatively designed a two-threshold group maintenance policy for
$k$
-out-of-
$n$
load-sharing systems. Such policy aims to save costs by mitigating the failure risks and minimizing the disturbance of maintenance activities to ensure continuous operation. Compared with existing studies, the proposed policy and modeling approach have two prominent superiorities. First, they are not limited to basic two-component systems which are addressed most. Second, arbitrary lifetime distribution is allowed in maintenance decision-making, which effectively expands the realistic application scope. To relieve the computation burden arising therefrom, a surrogate-aided approach is proposed to enhance the practicability for large-scale systems. We demonstrate the generality and superior performance of the approach through numerical experiments.