Availability of 3-out-of Warm Standby System.pdf

IEICE TRANS. FUNDAMENTALS, VOL.E83–A, NO.5 MAY 2000 857 LETTER Special Section on Reliability Theory and Its Applications Availability of 3-out-of-4:G Warm Standby System Tieling ZHANG?, Nonmember and Michio HORIGOME?, Member SUMMARY The purpose of this note is to carry out study on a 3-out-of-4:G warm standby system with nonidentical com- ponents. By using Markov model, the general form solution of stationary availability of the system is obtained. Examples are given to illustrate the solutions of transient and stationary avail- ability of such system. key words: availability, 3-out-of-4:G warm standby system, standby redundancy 1. Introduction Standby techniques are used to improve system avail- ability. Usually, a k-out-of-n:G standby system is assumed that when an operating component fails, a standby component becomes active and the system is working if at least k components are fault-free. In general, there are three types in component standby, i.e., cold, hot and warm standby. Cold standby im- plies that inactive components have a zero failure rate. Hot standby implies that an inactive component has the same failure rate as when it is in operation. Warm standby implies that an inactive component has a fail- ure rate between cold and hot, it is also called dormant failure in some papers. k-out-of-n:G warm standby sys- tems have been used in several research fields includ- ing medical diagnosis, redundant-system testing, power plant system and so on. There have been many articles concerning study on availability of k-out-of-n:G systems according to system configuration and connection of components, and the way of redundancy [1]–[9]. Schneeweiss [5] reviewed a general (non Markov) 1-out-of-2:G system with statistically-identical component, repair and cold standby, and studied the mean time to first failure of repairable systems with one cold standby. Akhtar [6] investigated reliability of k-out-of-n:G systems with im- perfect fault-coverage where recursive expres