A general repeat inspection plan for dependent multicharacteristic critical components

A component is critical if it causes disaster or a very high cost upon failure. Multicharacteristic critical components exist in many systems. Such components could be a part of an aircraft, space shuttle, a special weapon system or a gas ignition system. In many situations, characteristics’ failures of these components are statistically dependent. In this paper, a new inspection plan for such components is proposed. A mathematical model that depicts the plan is developed and an example demonstrating the results of the model is given. The advantage of this model over the other model where independence of the characteristics’ failure is assumed for the case of dependency is illustrated. The model resulted in an average of 32.4% reduction in cost compared to the situation where the dependency case is solved assuming statistical independence.