Infrastructures are considered as important facilities required for every country and society to be able to work properly. Aging\nand deterioration of such structures during their lifetime are a major concern both for maintenance researchers in the academic\nworld and for the practitioners. This concern is mainly because the deterioration increases the maintenance costs dramatically\nand lowers the reliability, availability, and safety of the structural system. Preventive maintenance and inspection activities are the\nmost usual means for keeping the structure in a good condition. This paper utilizes the concept of delay-time for developing the\noptimal inspection policy for deteriorating structures. In the proposed stochastic model, discrete times of inspection activities are\ntaken as the decision variables of an optimization problem, in a way that the obtained aperiodic (non uniform) inspection schedule\nminimizes the total downtime ratio of the structure. To illustrate the model capabilities, various numerical examples are solved and\nresults are compared with the traditional periodic (uniform) inspection policies. The results indicate the substantial reduction in\nsystem downtime due to the wisely planned inspection schedule and the appropriate utilization of delay-time concept, which is\nindeed a powerful framework for inspection optimization problems.
Loading....