Any company interested in pursuing such maintenance strategies must consider the risks related to the lack of
experience and the capital expenditures needed to purchase the necessary instrumentation and software. This
requires an evaluation of the opportunity of adopting such advanced maintenance policies founded on
specialized knowledge and modern technology. In this sense, evaluating under which conditions and to which
extent the CBM and PrM settings can improve the plant performance becomes a fundamental issue. Such
evaluation must be made in comparison to the performance of the ‘traditional’ CM and PM policies.
In the present work, this evaluation analysis is carried out by way of a reference example concerning the
stochastic crack growth of a mechanical component subject to fatigue degradation. Different maintenance
approaches are applied to show decision makers a way to go for gaining full understanding of the
characteristics of the different maintenance policies, and of their benefits.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces the reference example; the
performance of the CM policy is assessed in Section 3, and is compared to that of the PM policy in Section 4.
Section 5 and Section 6 apply the CBM and PrM policies, respectively, to the considered component and
compare the resulting performances with those of the PM and CM schemes. In particular, the prognostic
method which the PrM approach relies on is the Particle Filtering (PF) technique (e.g., Arulampalam et al.
2002). A general discussion is proposed in Section 7, whereas Section 8 concludes the work.