Imperfect inspection of a system with unrevealed failure and an unrevealed defective state

Cavalcante, C; Scarf, PA; Berrade, MD

Abstract

This paper proposes a model of inspection of a
protection system in which the inspection outcome provides
imperfect information of the state of the system. The system itself is required to operate on demand typically in emergency situations. The purpose of inspection is to determine the functional state of the system and consequently whether the system requires replacement. The system state is modeled using the delay time concept in which the failed state is preceded by a defective state. Imperfect inspection is quantified by a set of probabilities that relate the system state to the outcome of the
inspection. The paper studies the effect of these probabilities on the efficacy of inspection. The analysis indicates that preventive replacement mitigates low quality inspection and that inspection is cost-effective provided the imperfect-inspection probabilities are not too large. Some derivative policies in which replacement is “postponed” following a positive inspection are also studied. An isolation valve in a utility network motivates the modeling.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 22, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Mar 18, 2019
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jan 24, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 17, 2019
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Reliability
• Print ISSN: 0018-9529
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Volume: 68
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 764-775
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TR.2019.2897048
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/TR.2019.2897048
• Related Public URLs: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=24