A summary of periodic and random inspection policies

Some systems work for a job with random working times. It would be useful for such systems that they are checked at the completion of working times to detect their failures, which is called a random inspection policy. Two inspection policies, where a system is checked at periodic or successive times and also at every completion of working times, are considered. The total expected costs until the detection of failure are obtained, and when the random working time is exponential, optimal inspection policies which minimize them are derived analytically. Furthermore, the inspection policy where the system is checked only at every completion of N th working time is proposed. Finally, as one of modified random inspection models, the backup model where the system goes back to the latest checking time when it has failed is taken up and analyzed, by using the inspection policy.