More on optimal allocation of components in coherent systems

Abstract

More applications of the principle for interchanging components due to Boland et al. (1989) in reliability theory are presented. In the context of active redundancy improvement we show that if two nodes are permutation equivalent then allocating a redundancy component to the weaker position always results in a larger increase in system reliability, which generalizes a previous result due to Boland et al. (1992). In the case of standby redundancy enhancement, we prove that a series (parallel) system is the only system for which standby redundancy at the component level is always more (less) effective than at the system level. Finally, the principle for interchanging components is extended from binary systems to the more complicated multistate systems.