Minimal repair of failed components in coherent systems

Abstract

The minimal repair replacement is a reasonable assumption in many practical systems. Under this as- sumption a failed component is replaced by another one whose reliability is the same as that of the component just before the failure, i.e., a used component with the same age. In this paper we study the minimal repair in coherent systems. We consider both the cases of independent and dependent compo- nents. Three replacement policies are studied. In the first one, the first failed component in the system is minimally repaired while, in the second one, we repair the component which causes the system fail- ure. A new technique based on the relevation transform is used to compute the reliability of the systems obtained under these replacement policies. In the third case, we consider the replacement policy which assigns the minimal repair to a fixed component in the system. We compare these three options un- der different stochastic criteria and for different system structures. In particular, we provide the optimal strategies for all the coherent systems with 1–4 independent and identically distributed components.