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.