Designing Component Test Plans for Series System Reliability via Mathematical Programming
Jayant Rajgopal, Mainak Mazumdar · Technometrics · 1995
For verification of system reliability it is often necessary to conduct individual tests of components that compose the system. We consider a series system consisting of components with unequal test costs and unknown constant failure rates with preassigned bounds on the latter. We derive minimum costcomponent test plans that guarantee specified values of producers' and consumers' risks on the system reliability. These plans are derived for the case in which the component failure times are exponentially distributed, as well as the case in which they follow a gamma distribution. The optimization problems are formulated and solved via standard mathematical programming techniques.