Sequential Determination of Inspection Epochs for Reliability Systems with General Life Time Distributions

摘要

The problem of determining the optimal inspection epoch is studied for reliability systems in which N components operate in parallel. Life time distribution is arbitrary but known. The optimization is carried with respect to two cost factors: the cost of inspection a component and the cost of failure. The inspection epochs are determined so that the expected cost of the whole system per time unit per cycle will be minimized. The optimization process depends in the general case on the whole failure history of the system. This dependence is characterized. The cases of Weibull life time distributions are elaborated and illustrated numerically. The characteristics of the optimal inspection intervals are studied theoretically. (Author)