Optimization of Multi-Level Inspection Strategy for Multi-State Systems

摘要

By utilizing inspection data, reliability of a particular individual system can be dynamically updated. In view of the hierarchical structure of engineering systems, inspection data can be collected from multiple physical levels of a system. Nevertheless, due to the limited inspection resources, such as time, budget, and manpower, simultaneously inspecting all the components, subsystems, and the entire system is unaffordable. It, therefore, raises a natural question: how to identify the optimal inspection strategy under limited resources to reveal the health states of a system and its components to the maximum extent. To address the above question, a new metric is proposed in this paper to quantify the effectiveness of a particular inspection strategy in terms of revealing the states of components in a multi-state system. The optimal multi-level inspection strategy for the system is, thereby, determined by maximizing the proposed metric under limited inspection resources. An illustrative example shows that the proposed method can optimally allocate the limited inspection resources, so as to maximally reveal the states of components of interest and facilitate dynamic reliability assessment of a system.