Availability Modeling of a Digital Electronic System with Intermittent Failures and Continuous Testing

摘要

In this paper, we study a continuously tested digital electronic system subject to revealed, unrevealed, and intermittent failures. A new maintenance model is proposed for assessing the average availability of a digital electronic system by using a regenerative stochastic process with a finite number of states. Based on the properties of the regenerative process, general expressions are derived to calculate the mean times spent by the system in various operation and maintenance states. The average availability equation is derived under arbitrary and exponential failure distributions. Numerical examples illustrate the effect of fault coverage and failure rates on the average availability under exponential failure distributions. The proposed mathematical model considers the main failure types of digital telecommunications systems that allows more accurately assess the reliability of their operation.