Reliability and maintenance for performance-balanced systems operating in a shock environment

Due to practical engineering applications, the research on balanced systems has moved into development in recent years. The concept of balance differs from various perspectives and more reliability problems on balanced systems need to be further investigated. The system consists of multiple components with two-stage lifetime. When the locations of the components which are in poor operation stage concentrate in a particular range in the system, the high level of non-uniformed operation states of the components would speed up the failure process of the whole system. The interpretation of this real engineering situation is defined as that the system loses the performance balance and then the performance-balanced system with three competing criteria of system performance imbalance is established in this paper. A two-step finite Markov chain imbedding approach is employed to derive probabilistic indices both for components and whole system which operate in a shock environment. A combined maintenance policy is designed for the proposed model and an optimization model is constructed by minimizing mean maintenance cost. Numerical examples based on a battery pack system have served the purpose to present to applicability of the performance-balanced systems and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.