(BCMSW)-W-4-ST: On the Bi-directional Circular Multi-State System with Spatiotemporal Sliding Window for Sequential Tasks

In industrial applications, circular systems possess the natural ability to rotate bi-directionally, which essentially provides redundancy to maintain higher system reliability. This paper proposes a new model of bi-directional circular multi-state system with a spatiotemporal sliding window for sequential tasks (BCMS4W-ST). The sys-tem contains n mutually independent multi-state elements (MEs) in a circle and can rotate bi-directionally. The system functionality depends on the ability of r consecutive MEs starting from any ME in either counterclockwise or clockwise directions for completing pre-specified sequential tasks within a limited completion time. A uni-versal generating function technique is employed to describe and evaluate the system reliability. The reliability model is built by considering feasible performance assignment schemes of involved consecutive MEs, and a dynamic programming algorithm is introduced to efficiently determine the assignment scheme with the shortest completion time. Numerical experiments have demonstrated the proposed system model and the suggested al-gorithm. Finally, the element sequencing optimization for BCMS4W-ST is investigated as a viable way to improve system reliability. The proposed model and method support reliability analysis and improvement of circular multi-state sliding window systems with bi-directional rotation mechanism for completing sequential hetero-geneous tasks.