Abstract
The technology of preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance is widely applied to ships in order to maintain the good voyageable condition. One of the most important fields of marine engineering is to seek the maximum availability and to solve the stochastic maintenance problem such that the cost for corrective maintenance is minimized. Accordingly, for the purpose of making the most suitable maintenance schedule which minimizes the expected cost function, this paper suggests the method to grasp the failure characteristics by the ship's maintenance data that are collected from the past. And, suggests the method to estimate the optimal maintenance interval by using the dynamic programming and the cumulative hazard rate function attained from the maintenance data.