System design with deteriorative components for minimal life cycle costs

As modern systems are becoming more complex and automated, an important measure of their effectiveness is their reliability. For a system to perform below a maximum allowable failure rate, a reliability based design (RBD) of the system is imperative. An RBD of a mixed series-parallel system with deteriorative components for minimal life cycle costs is presented. This formulation incorporates the effects of preventive maintenance (PM) and minimal repair into the system failure rate and uses a five step methodology to obtain optimal system configuration, PM intervals and system economic life. Genetic algorithms are used to optimize the average annual costs of the system. The results presented are useful for reliability and maintenance engineers