Physical SciencesEngineeringSafety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

Reliability and Maintenance Optimization

Reliability and maintenance optimization is concerned with understanding how engineering systems degrade over time and deciding when and how to intervene before failure occurs. Because unplanned failures carry costs ranging from production losses to safety incidents, researchers develop mathematical models—drawing on stochastic processes, degradation theory, and statistical inference—to predict a system's remaining useful life and schedule maintenance accordingly. Active directions include moving beyond simple binary failure models toward multi-state and physics-of-failure representations that capture partial degradation, as well as integrating sensor data into condition-based and prognostic frameworks that trigger maintenance only when genuinely needed. A persistent challenge is validating these models when failure data are scarce, which has driven growing interest in accelerated degradation testing and risk-based approaches that weigh uncertainty explicitly rather than assuming it away.

Works
53,867
Total citations
604,196
Keywords
Reliability EngineeringMaintenance OptimizationDegradation ModelingCondition-Based MaintenanceMulti-State SystemsPrognostic Models

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