An overview of some classical models and discussion of the signature‐based models of preventive maintenance

Abstract In reliability engineering literature, a large number of research papers on optimal preventive maintenance (PM) of technical systems (networks) have appeared based on preliminary many different approaches. According to the existing literature on PM strategies, the authors have considered two scenarios for the component failures of the system. The first scenario assumes that the components of the system fail due to aging, while the second scenario assumes the system fails according to the fatal shocks arriving at the system from external or internal sources. This article reviews different approaches on the optimal strategies proposed in the literature on the optimal maintenance of multi‐component coherent systems. The emphasis of the article is on PM models given in the literature whose optimization criteria (cost function and stationary availability) are developed by using the signature‐based (survival signature‐based) reliability of the system lifetime. The notions of signature and survival signature, defined for systems consisting of one type or multiple types of components, respectively, are powerful tools assessing the reliability and stochastic properties of coherent systems. After giving an overview of the research works on age‐based PM models of one‐unit systems and ‐out‐of‐ systems, we provide a more detailed review of recent results on the signature‐based and survival signature‐based PM models of complex systems. In order to illustrate the theoretical results on different proposed PM models, we examine two real examples of coherent systems both numerically and graphically.