Optimal reliability and maintainability allocation in manufacturing systems

In this article an attempt has been made to solve an important task in the reliability management of manufacturing systems: the definition of reliability and maintainability specifications of parts, the general objective being to increase productivity while maintaining costs low. An analytical approach has been considered to evaluate an average index of production capability in series-parallel systems. A heuristic optimization procedure has been developed to solve the following problems: (a) determine the optimal reliability and maintainability allocation of parts to achieve the maximum production index at a given cost; and (b) determine the optimal reliability and maintainability allocation of parts which minimizes the total cost of investments, subject to the constraint of meeting a system production requirement. Numerical examples prove the effectiveness of the proposed procedure and show that the application of optimization analyses can provide large gains in terms of either productivity or total cost.