Optimal Repair of a Series System

Donald R. Smith
Additional contact information
Donald R. Smith: Columbia University, New York, New York

Operations Research, 1978, vol. 26, issue 4, 653-662

Abstract: A single repairman maintains a series system whose components have exponential failure and repair distributions. It is desired to assign the repairman to maximize the expected total discounted working time or average working time for the system. Whenever the failure rates of all components are equal, the time to repair the system from any initial state is stochastically independent of the operating policy. The Laplace transform of time to repair the system and the long-run average time that the system works are explicitly available. For the two-component series system the repair time is stochastically minimized if the failed component with longest expected lifetime is always under repair. This is true even if the repairman experiences random periods of time during which repair is not allowed. For an n -component series system the policy that always repairs the failed component with longest expected lifetime stochastically minimizes the repair time over the class of policies, that repair failed components in a predetermined order. We apply the results to a queuing system.

Date: 1978
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.26.4.653 (application/pdf)

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:inm:oropre:v:26:y:1978:i:4:p:653-662

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().