A study on the effect of infinitesimal switchover delays on the reliability of a redundant (mixed) system

In this paper, the effect of switchover delays on the reliability of a mixed (cold standby and parallel) redundant system has been evaluated. The delay or switchover time is assumed to be deterministic, i.e., a constant, and having a very small magnitude, as this is a more realistic proposition. A recently developed computational technique has been used for this purpose and the results compared with those obtained for the system by considering switchovers to be instantaneous. It is found that for systems operating for short durations, ignoring switchover delays, even of a very small duration leads to gross over estimation of system reliability. The analysis can be used for repairable systems also.