Modeling and analyzing the effects of periodic inspection on theperformance of safety-critical systems

摘要

This paper presents a method for incorporating into Markov modelsnof safety-critical systems, periodic inspections and repairs which occurndeterministically in time. Both perfect and imperfect inspections andnrepairs can be modeled. Based on this new modeling technique,nclosed-form solutions are derived for a variety of important performancenindexes including MTTF, MTTFD, MTTFS, averagenavailability, and average probability of failing dangerously. Thensolutions are applied to an example system to illustrate how the methodncan be used to study the effects on performance of: (a) choices of thentime-length between periodic inspections and repairs, and (b)nimprovements in inspection and repair techniques