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OPTIMAL MAINTENANCE AND OPERATION OF A SYSTEM WITH BACKUP COMPONENTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2002

Rhonda Righter
Rhonda Righter
Affiliation:
Department of Operations and Management Information Systems, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053, E-mail: RRighter@scu.edu
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Abstract

We consider a system with heterogeneous unreliable components that requires only one component to be turned on in order for it to operate. Repair workers may have different skills and may be unavailable for random periods of time. The problem is to determine a usage and repair policy to maximize system availability. We give conditions under which the optimal usage policy is to always use, or turn on, the component with the shortest repair time, and the optimal repair policy is to always repair the most reliable component (with the smallest failure rate). We fully characterize the optimal policy when there are only two components. Our system is equivalent to a closed system with multiple single-server queues, where the objective is to minimize server idle time at one of the queues.

Type
Research Article
Information
Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , July 2002 , pp. 339 - 349
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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