On operation termination for degrading systems with two types of failures

When a failure occurring during a system operation can result in considerable penalties, it can be more cost-effective to terminate the operation at some time avoiding the risk of future failures. This strategy can be relevant for aging systems, for example, when the system failure rate is increasing. The paper analyzes three strategies of termination for systems with major and minor failures. A major failure automatically terminates the operation, whereas the minor failures are minimally repaired. We show that the age-based strategy outperforms the one with termination after the mth minimal repair. The combined strategy when the termination is performed at time t or upon the mth minimal repair, whichever comes first, is also considered. The emphasis for the latter setting is on the practically relevant case when the number of possible minimal repairs is limited. Numerical examples illustrating the findings are presented.