15th Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control
  Barcelona, 21–26 July 2002 
AN OPERATIONAL APPROACH TO BUDGET-CONSTRAINED RELIABILITY ALLOCATION
N. Eva Wu, Xiaoxia Wang, Meera Sampath, Gregory Kott
Dept. of EE, Binghamton Univ., Binghamton, NY 13902, USA
evawu,xwang1@binghamton.edu, Tel: (607) 777-4856
Xerox Wilson Center, Webster, NY 14580, USA
msampath,gkott@crt.xerox.com, Tel: (716)422-4058

In this paper the problem of maximal increase of system reliability is formulated as a resource allocation problem under a budget constraint. Dynamic programing is used for the optimal solution. Time to system failure is dictated by a Markov process. The system is composed of several subsystems. Each subsystem has several possible configurations that exhibit different levels of fault tolerance and incur different incremental costs at different times. Configuration dependence among subsystems is allowed. An example resembling a fault tolerant industrial process is presented, for which the proposed algorithm is used to obtain a set of maximally reliable solutions corresponding to a set of budget constraints.
Keywords: fault tolerant systems, reliability, Markov process, constrained optimization, dynamic programing
Session slot T-Fr-A10: Fault Tolerant Control Issues/Area code 7e : Fault Detection, Supervision and Safety of Technical Processes