A fast approximation method for reliability analysis of cold‐standby systems

Analyzing reliability of large cold‐standby systems has been a complicated and time‐consuming task, especially for systems with components having non‐exponential time‐to‐failure distributions. In this paper, an approximation model, which is based on the central limit theorem, is presented for the reliability analysis of binary cold‐standby systems. The proposed model can estimate the reliability of large cold‐standby systems with binary‐state components having arbitrary time‐to‐failure distributions in an efficient and easy way. The accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are illustrated using several different types of distributions for both 1‐out‐of‐n and k‐out‐of‐n cold‐standby systems.