Inspection schemes for randomly deteriorating systems /
This study develops inspection schemes for deteriorating equipment with non-self announcing failures. A failure can be detected only by inspection. Such is the case in many protective systems, such as circuit breakers, alarms, and protective relays, as well as in spare or stand-by systems. An inspec...
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| Format: | Thesis Book |
| Language: | English |
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[Place of publication not identified] :
[publisher not identified] ;
1999.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://proxy.library.tamu.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=730294141&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=2945&RQT=309&VName=PQD |
| Summary: | This study develops inspection schemes for deteriorating equipment with non-self announcing failures. A failure can be detected only by inspection. Such is the case in many protective systems, such as circuit breakers, alarms, and protective relays, as well as in spare or stand-by systems. An inspection policy for such equipment consists of pre-assigned ages at which the equipment is inspected and instructions on what actions to perform upon observing the state of the system at each inspection. Of interest in this research is determining simple, implementable inspection policies with easily computable performance measures. For systems requiring inspection, availability is often more important than economic effectiveness. Rather than develop a cost model, we focus on computing the "competing'' performance measures of limiting average availability and long-run inspection rate. New inspection policies are constructed so that they perform well in trade-offs between these measures. That is, we assign inspection ages which guarantee a specified level of availability with as low an inspection rate as possible, or conversely, which achieve as high a level of availability as possible given a fixed inspection capacity. Another interest of this study is in elective inspection strategies considering the operating environment of systems. Lifetime distributions of two identical systems behave differently if they operate in different environmental conditions and, hence inspection scheduling should be different. When a manufacturer sells identical systems to several customers, he (or she) needs to provide an inspection policy for each customer according to the unique operating environment. In such cases, life testing in the laboratory might not be feasible because the laboratory condition cannot mimic the random environment of customers, or might cost too much because a life testing should be performed for every single customer. In this research, inspection strategies for such cases are suggested under certain assumptions. Useful characteristics of lifetime distribution are also presented when the environment is explicitly considered. |
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| Item Description: | Vita. "Major Subject: Industrial Engineering". |
| Physical Description: | ix, 95 leaves : illustrations ; 28 cm. Issued also on microfiche from University Microfilm Inc. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-94). |