Optimal Reliability Design of Systems under Changing Environment

Abstract

This paper presents a new formulation of an optimal reliability design problem for a system under changing environment, where the system components have time-dependent reliability. Our optimization problem is of a nonlinear mixed-integer program and its solution determines simultaneously an optimal reliability allocation and an optimal preventive maintenance schedule. A computationally economical method of solution is presented on the basis of a nonlinear programming algorithm. By use of an illustrative example, the importance of our formulation is shown in comparison with other two formulations.