ABSTRACT
In this work we deal with a maintenance policy for a system whose failures are unrevealed with probability p or revealed with probability 1−p, which is inspected at working ages kT, k = 1, 2, . . .. An imperfect repair puts the system back into the functioning state after each of the first N − 1 failures while the N th failure is restored by means of a perfect repair. This model extends a previous one, (Badía and Berrade 2009), where all the failures where unrevealed. In section 2 we present the maintenance model and outline the calculations to get the cost function. Section 3 contains the study of optimum policies and some results concerning its existence. Sections 4 and 5 are respectively devoted to some illustrative examples and concluding remarks.
