| Article ID: | iaor19911090 |
| Country: | Netherlands |
| Volume: | 45 |
| Issue: | 2/3 |
| Start Page Number: | 203 |
| End Page Number: | 218 |
| Publication Date: | Apr 1990 |
| Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
| Authors: | Devooght J., Dubus A., Smidts C. |
| Keywords: | inspection, markov processes |
Complex systems regularly inspected to maintain a high availability level may be described by a finite state Markov chain, including human errors. Inspection and repair are imperfect due to incomplete information and/or instrumentation failure. Suboptimal inspection policies are obtained by a dynamic programming algorithm based on the use of importance parameters for the components. A Markovian evolution code is combined with an optimization code using a value iteration algorithm. Numerical examples are given for a 128 states system.