| Article ID: | iaor20162198 |
| Volume: | 10 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Start Page Number: | 48 |
| End Page Number: | 71 |
| Publication Date: | May 2016 |
| Journal: | International Journal of Reliability and Safety |
| Authors: | Kumar M, Siju K C |
| Keywords: | production, maintenance, repair & replacement, simulation, markov processes, scheduling, combinatorial optimization |
In this paper, we consider two types of series‐parallel systems with the following specifications: (a) subsystems having identical parallel components (b) subsystems having non‐identical parallel components. Assume that s repairmen are available at each of the parallel subsystems. The time to failure and time to repair are assumed to be exponentially distributed. In this work, we introduce the repair dependence function that facilitates the s repairmen to provide service individually or together with respect to the number of failed components. The continuous time Markov model is used to study the effect of repair dependence function on the reliability and availability of the respective systems. The cost analysis and cost‐benefit analysis based on mean time to failure and steady state availability are also presented. Finally, we illustrate our results through MATLAB programming by considering some examples.