Design of optimum component test plans in the demonstration of diverse system performance measures

Abstract

While component-level tests have many advantages over system-level tests, the actual protection offered in making inferences about system reliability is not the same as what is expected. Thus, a significant proportion of research has concentrated on the design of system-based component test plans that also have minimum cost. This article extends those previous studies by considering two additional system performance measures: expected system lifetime and system availability. After explicitly expressing these performance measures as a function of failure rates for various system types, the component testing problem is formulated as a semi-infinite linear programming problem and solved with a column generation technique incorporating signomial geometric programming. Several numerical examples are presented that provide insight on the model parameters.

Keywords:

• Component testing
• mean-time-to-failure
• availability
• semi-infinite linear programming
• column generation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the referees for their important comments and constructive suggestions. The authors also thank the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council (TÜBİTAK) for its financial support of this project (grant 106M044).