A repairable system is composed of components of I types. A component can be loaded, put on standby, queued or repaired. The repair facility is here assumed to be a queueing system of a rather general structure though interruption of repairs is not allowed. Type i components possess a lifetime distribution Ai(t) and repair time distribution Bi(t). The lifetime of component j is exhausted with a state-dependent rate αi(t). A Markov process Z(t) with supplementary variables is built to investigate the system behaviour. An ergodic result, Theorem 1, is established under a set of conditions convenient for light traffic analysis. In Theorems 2 to 6, a light traffic limit is derived for the joint steady state distribution of supplementary variables. Applying these results, Theorems 7 to 10 derive light traffic properties of a busy period-measured random variable. Essentially, the concepts of light traffic equivalence due to Daley and Rolski, and Asmussen are used. The asymptotic (light traffic) insensitivity of busy period and steady state parameters to the form of Ai(t) [given their means and (in some cases) values of density functions for small t], is observed under some analytic conditions.
