Optimal maintenance of systems with Markovian mission and deterioration

We consider the maintenance of a mission-based system that is designed to perform missions consisting of a random sequence of phases or stages with random durations. A finite state Markov process describes the mission process. The age or deterioration process of the system is described by another finite state Markov process whose generator depends on the phases of the mission. We discuss optimal repair and optimal replacement problems, and characterize the optimal policies under some monotonicity assumptions. We also provide numerical illustrations to demonstrate the structure of the optimal policies. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.