Redundancy Allocation using Component-Importance Measures for Maximizing System Reliability

SYNOPTIC ABSTRACT

Redundancy allocation, being an important and effective way to improve system reliability, has been discussed by many authors. The main idea, which has been advocated in this article, lies in the fact that some components have more significance in the functioning of the system than the others; because of this, it is expected that if allocation of the redundant component is made according to some component-importance measure, optimality can be achieved easily. The novelty of this study is that the problem of redundancy allocation has been solved by allocating redundant components according to some component-importance measures that are not very difficult to obtain and comprehend for an engineered system, even when there is no information about the reliability of the components. The component structural-importance measure and reliability-importance measure have been used in this work for the purpose of allocating redundancy. The results derived can be used to maximize system reliability using redundancy allocation for a general n-component coherent system. Applications of the results have been illustrated with examples of coherent systems.

Key Words and Phrases:

• active redundancy
• component-importance measure
• optimization
• structure function
• system reliability