You perform maintenance to assess the condition of the system and its components to prevent the occurrence of a failure event. Maintenance includes routine checks performed on the system and minor maintenance tasks performed on components, such as filter changes and air pressure checks. Maintenance often identifies benign failures and initiates corrective maintenance of such failures. After maintenance is performed, the system and its components are generally in a better condition.

Because performing maintenance can be costly, the intervals at which it is performed must be carefully considered. In the RBD module, you can optimize maintenance intervals based on minimizing or maximizing a specified objective function, which is referred to as the goal.

The optimal maintenance interval value is the number of days between performing a task to achieve this goal. For example, if the goal is to minimize total cost, then the optimal value represents the number of days between a task that minimizes its total cost. Optimal task intervals are calculated using optimization algorithms integrated within the Monte Carlo simulation engine. For more information, see Calculating an Optimal Interval for a Maintenance Task.