In reliability studies, there are situations where failures of a component can only be detected through inspections. The purpose of inspections is then to identify whether the component is in a working state or not, and thereby to plan and carry out necessary maintenance actions if needed.

The majority of existing optimization of inspection and maintenance problems are solved on the basis of numerical procedures. Solutions derived are then either optimal or near optimal. These later are obtained by assumptions added to the initial model. In the present work, the primary objective is to propose an heuristic based-approach to compute a near optimal inspection and maintenance planning for a stochastic degrading system. A Genetic algorithm is then developed to solve the inspection/maintenance optimization initially introduced in by Munford and Shahani [2]. The results obtained are then compared to those obtained in the literature.