Component and system burn-in for repairable systems

Abstract

From the system viewpoint there are at least two options to screen out defective components. First, components undergo burn-in for various times before they are placed together in a system, which is called component burn-in. Second, systems face burn-in after being assembled from components, called system burn-in. This article compares these two options for repairable systems. System reliability and rate of occurrence of system failures are used as the criteria for comparisons. To model successive system failures during system burn-in, two common types of repair are considered: component replacement and minimal repair. For each repair type analytical results are obtained that show that both component and system burn-in have a positive impact on the criteria, with component burn-in outperforming system burn-in. These results are obtained under the assumption that each component in a system has a decreasing failure rate distribution. Accepted in 2005 for a special issue on Reliability co-edited by Hoang Pham, Rutgers University; Dong Ho Pak, Hallym University, Korea; and Richard Cassady, University of Arkansas.