Resilience Allocation for Engineered System Design

Abstract

Most engineered systems are designed with high levels of system redundancies to satisfy required reliability requirements under adverse events, resulting in high systems’ life-cycle costs (LCCs). Recent years have seen a surge of interest and tremendous advance in prognostics and health management (PHM) methods that detect, diagnose, and predict the effects of adverse events. The PHM methods enable proactive maintenance decisions, giving rise to adaptive reliability. In this paper, we present a resilience allocation problem (RAP) whose goal is to allocate reliability and PHM efficiency to components in an engineering context. The optimally allocated reliability and PHM efficiency levels serve as the design specifications for the system reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) and the system PHM design, which can be used to derive the detailed design of components and PHM units. The RAP is demonstrated using a simplified aircraft control actuator design problem resulting in a highly resilient actuator with optimally allocated reliability, PHM efficiency and redundancy for the given parameter settings.