Reliability Evaluation of Standby Systems

Redundancy is a basic and fundamental concept used in reliability engineering. However, the methods for analyzing the reliability of redundant systems, particularly for systems with standby redundancy, are limited. In this paper, using the concepts of counting processes, a simple, accurate, and computationally efficient method to evaluate the reliability of standby systems is presented. The method efficiently analyzes the systems with non-identical components, cold/warm/hot standby components, shared standby components among different subsystems operating at different conditions, switching failures, and general failure time distributions. The proposed method is demonstrated using several examples. The results include CPU times for solving the examples as well as the complete listing of the MATLAB script used. The examples demonstrate that the proposed method provides a practical and accurate way of evaluating the reliability of complex standby configurations that arise in a wide range of applications.