Economic-based design of engineering systems with degrading components

The allocation of means and tolerances to provide quality and reliability is a challenge. Traditional measures include mean time to failure and its variance; however, they have some shortcomings. In this paper, a monetary measure based on present worth is invoked. The sum of the production cost and the expected loss of quality cost over time and rates are invoked. The cumulative distribution function for time-variant distributions due to degrading components is required. The proposed framework extends both classical reliability and methods that assume system degradation profiles. The design of an automobile overrun clutch shows the practicality and promise of the approach.