In the related art, a maintenance schedule is laid out on the basis of the experience and the intuition of an individual serviceperson. Therefore, the risk of damages to a user caused by the unavailability of a product and the cost required for maintenance cannot be balanced.
If it is attempted to replace a component, which is highly likely to be broken, before the component reaches the end of durable life and reduce the risk of a product failure, replacement work has to be performed more than necessary and the cost of maintenance increases. Conversely, if it is attempted to use up the component until the component reaches the end of durable life to reduce the maintenance cost, the component is replaced after the component is broken. Therefore, downtime is long and damages to the user caused by unavailability of the product increase. In other words, there is a tradeoff relation between the risk of failure of the component and the maintenance cost.
In a technique disclosed in JP-A-2007-4298, a maintenance schedule is laid out on the basis of a failure probability. In this technique, the maintenance schedule is laid out on the basis of a failure probability of a product as a whole. However, it is not determined whether components should be replaced. Further, the laid-out maintenance schedule does not present how the components should be combined and replaced.