| Article ID: | iaor19942150 |
| Country: | United States |
| Volume: | 40 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Start Page Number: | 418 |
| End Page Number: | 428 |
| Publication Date: | Mar 1994 |
| Journal: | Management Science |
| Authors: | Duyn Schouten Frank A. van der, Wartenhorst Pieter |
| Keywords: | quality & reliability, markov processes, stochastic processes |
A two-unit cold standby system with Markovian degrading units and one repair facility is considered. Two types of repair are possible: preventive and corrective, where the latter is supposed to be more time consuming than the first. The system is controlled by a repair policy of control limit type: a preventive repair on the working unit is carried out as soon as the state of this unit exceeds a certain threshold unless the repair facility is occupied by the other unit. In this paper the authors derive explicit expressions for the Laplace transforms of the up- and down-periods of this system, which provide insight in the availability of the system and which can be used to obtain approximations for the interval availability distribution. An iterative numerical procedure is presented for the special case of generalized Erlangian distributed repair times.