A General Reliability and Maintenance Cost Model of Series Systems with Arbitrary Repair Time

摘要

This paper investigates reliability and maintenance cost measures of the series system with n constituting components under the general assumption that each component is subject to correlated failure and repair, imperfect repair, practical shut-off rule, and arbitrary lifetime and repair time distributions. Imperfect repair is modeled through the basic idea of quasi renewal processes introduced by H. Wang and H. Pham (1996). System availability, mean time between system failures, mean time between system repairs, asymptotic fractional down time of the system etc., are obtained. A numerical example is presented to compare with some previous models. Measure of imperfect maintenance cost is then proposed. Finally, optimization models to optimize system reliability and/or system maintenance costs are provided, and using them optimum system maintenance policies are discussed through a numerical example.