Abstract
Redundancy or standby is a technique that has been widely applied to improving system reliability and availability in the stage of system design. In this paper, we consider a standby system with two units in which the first unit (unit 1) starts its operation under active state and the other unit (unit 2) is under cold standby state at the starting point. After a specified time s (switching time), the state of unit 2 is changed to warm standby state and, as soon as the operating unit 1 fails, the state of unit 2 is changed to active state. If unit 1 fails before time s, the system fails. Units can fail at both active and warm standby states. A general method for modeling the standby system is adopted and system performance measures (system reliability and mean life) based on the proposed model are derived. Three models -a perfect switching model and two imperfect switching models -are considered in this paper. Two imperfect switching models include an imperfect switching probability and a preliminary warm-up period which is required for the change from cold standby state to warm standby state. We consider the problem of determining the optimal switching time which maximizes the expected system life and related allocation problem is also discussed. Some numerical examples are studied.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 880-886 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| Journal | Reliability Engineering and System Safety |
| Volume | 95 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2010 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors would like to thank the referees for very helpful, kind and careful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOEHRD, Basic Research Promotion Fund) ( KRF-2008-314-C00060 ).
Keywords
- Accelerated life test
- Active state
- Cold and warm standby state
- Mean life
- Reliability
- Standby system