A confidence-based approach to reliability design considering correlated failures

Lance Fiondella, Yi-Kuei Lin, Hoang Pham, Ping-Chen Chang and Chendong Li

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2017, vol. 165, issue C, 102-114

Abstract: To maintain a competitive edge, technology manufacturers must produce systems that are reliable enough to satisfy customers yet cheap enough to engineer so that they are profitable. This paper presents an optimization model to maximize the statistical confidence in product profitability, permitting flexibility in the design and number of the units manufactured. This is unlike traditional approaches, which focus on the two cases that optimize the reliability of a single unit or the s-expected profit obtained from a very large number of units. These two extremes disregard a practical concern, namely the negative impact that a larger than s-expected number of failures will exert on product profitability. This paper formulates an optimization problem to mitigate this risk. Virtually all reliability optimization problems also assume that component failures are s-independent. The present paper does not impose this assumption. The utility of the approach is demonstrated through a series of examples which compare the reliability of systems designed with and without the assumption of s-correlated component failures. The results indicate that explicitly considering s-correlation consistently mitigates the risk to profitability more effectively than the same method when component failures are assumed to be s-independent.

Keywords: Reliability design; Redundancy allocation; s-correlated failure; s-confidence optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832016301600
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:165:y:2017:i:c:p:102-114

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2017.03.025

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().