Access Type

Open Access Dissertation

Date of Award

January 2015

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

First Advisor

Qingyu Yang

Abstract

Modern engineering systems generally consist of multiple components that interact in a complex manner. Reliability analysis of multi-component repairable systems plays a critical role for system safety and cost reduction. Establishing reliability models and scheduling optimal maintenance plans for multi-component repairable systems, however, is still a big challenge when considering the dependency of component failures. Existing models commonly make prior assumptions, without statistical verification, as to whether different component failures are independent or not. In this dissertation, data-driven systematic methodologies to characterize component failure dependency of complex systems are proposed. In CHAPTER 2, a parametric reliability model is proposed to capture the statistical dependency among different component failures under partially perfect repair assumption. Based on the proposed model, statistical hypothesis tests are developed to test the dependency of component failures. In CHAPTER 3, two reliability models for multi-component systems with dependent competing risks under imperfect assumptions are proposed, i.e., generalized dependent latent age model and copula-based trend-renewal process model. The generalized dependent latent age model generalizes the partially perfect repair model by involving the extended virtual age concept. And the copula-based trend renewal process model utilizes multiple trend functions to transform the failure times from original time domain to a transformed time domain, in which the repair conditions can be treated as partially perfect. Parameter estimation methods for both models are developed. In CHAPTER 4, based on the generalized dependent latent age model, two periodic inspection-based maintenance polices are developed for a multi-component repairable system subject to dependent competing risks. The first maintenance policy assumes all the components are restored to as good as new once a failure detected, i.e., the whole system is replaced. The second maintenance policy considers the partially perfect repair, i.e., only the failed component can be replaced after detection of failures. Both the maintenance policies are optimized with the aim to minimize the expected average maintenance cost per unit time. The developed methodologies are demonstrated by using applications of real engineering systems.

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