Heuristic testing procedures for general coherent systems

The authors consider the problem of minimizing the expected cost of inspecting a general coherent system. Except for certain special cases for which simple optimal testing policies do exist, the problem is generally known to be computationally intractable. In this paper, the authors first give some upper and lower bounds on the minimum expected total inspection cost. Then they propose some heuristic optimization procedures for solving the problem approximately. The present computational experience indicates that these heuristics are extremely effective in comparison with the dynamic programming exact solution procedure.