Abstract
The pod slewing system is a complex hydraulic system that can realize the ship's yawing or reversing. Thus, its performance directly affects the maneuverability and flexibility of the ship. Existing research on the pod slewing system has mostly focused on its design and control aspects. This paper makes contributions by modeling the reliability of the pod slewing system and performing the component importance analysis using the integrated importance measure and the griffith importance measure to identify weak or vulnerable components of the system. Based on the importance analysis results, the optimal maintenance strategy is investigated, which maximizes the system performance subject to the constraint on the total maintenance costs. Example solutions to the optimized maintenance strategies are demonstrated for different mission time and different cost constraints.