Reliability Analysis Of Repairable Systems

In this thesis five repairable systems are considered for which the formulations of steady-state availability and downtime distribution are presented. The components in the reliability configurations, standby, series systems and R-out-of-N systems, are assumed identical. A finite number of spares, M, is available to install into the system to replace failed items and repair action returns the failed items to a good-as-new state. There is only one server who has to undertake both replacement and repair, the replacement action has priority over repair action. Throughout this thesis the replacement times and repair times are assumed to have general probability distributions. In chapter two, warm waiting is added; the working times of components and lifetimes of warm waiting spares are assumed to have exponential distributions. In chapters 3 and 5, the working times are also distributed exponentially. In chapters 4 and 6 the working system lifetimes are allowed to have general distributions.The stochastic models considered in this thesis are studied using the supplementary variable method. A lot of the equations can be solved by intuitive probabilistic arguments: this makes our results and their processes simple and beautiful.Numerical examples are shown in all chapters, except chapters one and seven. The calculations and simulation were done by using FORTRAN, and many subroutine programs come from the NAG software library.