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The paper analyses the influence of the effect of inertia on the reliability of production systems. Systems inertia represents the phenomenon of continuing work for some time after the breakdown of one of the former phases. In our considerations, inertia is treated as the time elapsed from the onset of breakdown till the system's inability to work. A special method had to be devised to investigate the effect of inertia in order to evaluate the reliability of production systems and to attempt algorithmization to control the reliability of production system by means of inertia or reserving. The method of reliability analysis is presented only in an inform aspect. The possibilities of increasing reliability of production systems are listed. A comparison of the redundancy method and inertia method is presented. The results of this comparison and simulated investigations of influence of inertia on reliability of system are essential scope of the paper. Selected conclusions are as follows: when inertia approaches the last phase in the system, its influence on the shape of the distribution of the system's ability increases; an increase in inertia causes an increase in the availability of the system which approaches a certain border value; dependence of the average of a system's disability on inertia has a saddle-like character whereas dependence of the number of breakdowns (stoppages) in the system has the nature of an S-curve.
In recent years increasingly consideration has been given to the lifetime extension of existing structures. This is based on the fact that a growing percentage of civil infrastructure as well as buildings is threatened by obsolescence and that due to simple monetary reasons this can no longer be countered by simply re-building everything anew. Hence maintenance interventions are required which allow partial or complete structural rehabilitation. However, maintenance interventions have to be economically reasonable, that is, maintenance expenditures have to be outweighed by expected future benefits. Is this not the case, then indeed the structure is obsolete - at least in its current functional, economic, technical, or social configuration - and innovative alternatives have to be evaluated. An optimization formulation for planning maintenance interventions based on cost-benefit criteria is proposed herein. The underlying formulation is as follows: (a) between maintenance interventions structural deterioration is described as a random process; (b) maintenance interventions can take place anytime throughout lifetime and comprise the rehabilitation of all deterioration states above a certain minimum level; and (c) maintenance interventions are optimized by taking into account all expected life-cycle costs (construction, failure, inspection and state-dependent repair costs) as well as state- or time-dependent benefit rates. The optimization is performed by an evolutionary algorithm. The proposed approach also allows to determine optimal lifetimes and acceptable failure rates. Numerical examples demonstrate the importance of defining benefit rates explicitly. It is shown, that the optimal solution to maintenance interventions requires to take action before reaching the acceptable failure rate or the zero expected net benefit rate level. Deferring decisions with respect to maintenance not only results, in general, in higher losses, but also results in overly hazardous structures.