Title: System reliability estimation and cost analysis of series-parallel systems in the presence of repair dependence function

Authors: K.C. Siju; M. Kumar

Addresses: Department of Mathematics, National Institute of Technology, Calicut, Kerala, India ' Department of Mathematics, National Institute of Technology, Calicut, Kerala, India

Abstract: In this paper, we consider two types of series-parallel systems with the following specifications: (a) subsystems having identical parallel components (b) subsystems having non-identical parallel components. Assume that s repairmen are available at each of the parallel subsystems. The time to failure and time to repair are assumed to be exponentially distributed. In this work, we introduce the repair dependence function that facilitates the s repairmen to provide service individually or together with respect to the number of failed components. The continuous time Markov model is used to study the effect of repair dependence function on the reliability and availability of the respective systems. The cost analysis and cost-benefit analysis based on mean time to failure and steady state availability are also presented. Finally, we illustrate our results through MATLAB programming by considering some examples.

Keywords: repair dependence function; dependence classes; system reliability; availability; cost analysis; cost-benefit analysis; reliability estimation; series-parallel systems; continuous time Markov model; mean time to failure.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRS.2016.076345

International Journal of Reliability and Safety, 2016 Vol.10 No.1, pp.48 - 71

Received: 21 Apr 2015
Accepted: 30 Dec 2015

Published online: 04 May 2016 *

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