Optimal System Reliability Parameters with Minimum Costs

This paper gives a procedure for a repairable complex system which will determine the failure and repair rates as well as the number of redundant components to achieve minimum total s-expected cost for a given availability. The total s-expected cost is the s-expected investment and operating costs. The capital investment cost function is related to the steady-state availability of each component and the operating cost function to the steady-state probability of the system's being in a particular state.