Reliability analysis and maintenance strategy for phased-mission balanced systems with flexible structure

Balanced systems are widely applied in aeronautics, robotics and other engineering fields. In many practical cases, many balanced systems are required to complete a mission in multiple phases. Such systems usually have different system structures in each mission phase, but existing models are not sufficient to assess the system reliability, so the reliability model for phased-mission balanced systems is investigated in this paper. The system consists of multiple multi-state components, but different components are required to operate to complete different tasks in different phases. The components degradation process is described by the same continuous-time Markov process. All components need to work in similar states, which means that the difference between the maximum and minimum component states should not be greater than a critical value. In this paper, different Markov processes are constructed for each phase of the system. Markov process imbedding technique is applied to assess the system reliability at each phase. A maintenance strategy is designed, and the system state is detected between phases to determine whether maintenance should be carried out. Finally, an analytical example based on the production line balancing problem of a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed model.