Zhiqiang Cai
The post-warranty random maintenance policies for the product with random working cycles
Advanced sensors and measuring technologies make it possible to monitor the product working cycle. This means the manufacturer’s warranty to ensure reliability performance can be designed by monitoring the product working cycle and the consumer’s post-warranty maintenance to sustain the post-warranty reliability can be modeled by tracking the product working cycle. However, the related works appear seldom in existing literature. In this article, we incorporate random working cycle into warranty and propose a novel warranty ensuring reliability performance of the product with random working cycles. By extending the proposed warranty to the post-warranty maintenance, besides we investigate the postwarranty random maintenance policies sustaining the post-warranty reliability, i.e., replacement last (first) with preventive maintenance (PM). The cost rate is constructed for each post-warranty random maintenance policy. Finally, sensitivity of proposed warranty and investigated polices is analyzed. We discover that replacement last (first) with PM is superior to replacement last (first).
Defensive strategy optimization of consecutive-k-out-of-n systems under deterministic external risks
Consecutive-k-out-of-n (Con/k/n) system, a reconfigurable system, can improve the system performance by adjusting the redundancy and assignment of components. This paper aims to determine the optimal defensive strategy of Con/k/n systems under external risks. The defensive capability of Con/k/n systems is evaluated based on real-time system reliability, and a defensive importance measure (DIM) is constructed to optimize components’ redundancy locally. To solve the proposed optimization model effectively, a DIM-based genetic algorithm (DIGA) is developed by integrating the advantages of DIM’s local search with the global search ability of the classical genetic algorithm (CGA). The numerical experiment under 36 scenarios illustrates that DIGA is more effective than CGA verified by average defensive capability, robustness, and convergence generations. Moreover, the redundancy distribution analysis of Con/k/5 systems in the optimal defensive strategy shows that the redundancy of F(G) systems is in a spaced (continuous) way under spacing k-1 risk or continuous k risk.