Minimum cost component test plans for evaluating reliability of a highly reliable parallel system

One approach to evaluating system reliability is the use of system based component test plans. Such plans have numerous advantages over complete system level tests, primarily in terms of time and cost savings. This paper considers one of the two basic building blocks of many complex systems, namely a system of n parallel components, and develops minimum cost component test plans for evaluating the reliability of such a system when the component reliabilities are known to be high. Two different decision rules are considered and the corresponding optimization problems are formulated and solved using techniques from mathematical programming.