Optimal sequencing of warm standby elements

•Mission cost and reliability model for warm standby systems is developed.•Time-to-failure distributions of elements are taken into account.•The method uses discrete approximation of the distributions.•An algorithm for optimal sequencing of standby elements is suggested.

Warm standby redundancy has been used as an effective design technique for improving the reliability of a system while achieving the compromise between restoration cost and operation cost of standby elements. This paper considers the optimal standby element sequencing problem (SESP) for 1-out-of-N: G heterogeneous warm-standby systems. Given the desired redundancy level and a fixed set of element choices, the objective of the optimal system design is to select the initiation sequence of the system elements so as to minimize the expected mission cost of the system while providing a certain level of system reliability. Based on a discrete approximation of time-to-failure distributions of the system elements, the system reliability and expected mission cost are evaluated using an iterative procedure. A genetic algorithm is used as an optimization tool for solving the formulated SESP problem for 1-out-of-N: G warm-standby systems with non-identical elements. As illustrated through examples, results generated using the suggested methodology can facilitate the system reliability versus cost trade-off study, which can further assist in the decision making about the best standby policy for fault-tolerant system designs.