A novel Load allocation policy for reliability improvement of load-sharing systems with two continuously degrading components

Frequently used to improve system reliability, load-sharing mechanism has been widely applied to many engineering practices. In a load-sharing system, the components bear the whole load together, and the load of a failed component will be allocated to the surviving components, which will surely affect their reliability. The traditional equal load-sharing policy is the most popular allocation policy. However, due to heterogeneity of unit individual attributes and working environment, components of a load-sharing system will be in different degradation states and reliability levels. Confronted with this problem, this paper proposes a novel load allocation policy for reliability improvement of load-sharing systems. The components are subject to continuous degradation, which can be modelled by Wiener process. Based on their periodically inspected degradation states, the whole load will be allocated to the components according to their current and predictive degradation states. Numerical studies are conducted under different degradation model parameters. Compared with the traditional equal load allocation policy, the proposed policy can lead to effective and robust reliability improvement.