2009 IEEE International Conference on
Systems, Man, and Cybernetics |
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Abstract
New designs prioritized for the fast time-to-market
usually can not carry out sufficient in-house reliability growth
testing due to the stringent delivery deadline. Reliability
improvement for those systems can be achieved by implementing
corrective actions (CAs) on in-service systems. In this paper,
three types of effectiveness functions are proposed to measure the
reduction rate of failure modes given different CA resources.
Integrated with the effectiveness function, a new failure intensity
model is proposed for predicting the mean-time-between-failures
(MTBF) of field systems. Finally, a multi-objective optimization
model is formulated to maximize the system reliability and to
minimize the reliability uncertainty with the constraint of the CA
resources. Genetic Algorithms combined with greedy heuristic
are applied to search the optimal CA decisions that lead to the
maximum reliability growth while minimizing the reliability
uncertainty. Results show that the proposed reliability growth
program can effectively guide decision-makers to find the most
effective corrective actions for achieving the reliability goal for a
large fleet of in-service systems. Throughout paper, systems and
products will be used interchangeably.